


Monster

by FlamingGeckoBits (Covenmouse)



Series: Wasteland Messiah [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: Alternate Reality, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cannibalism, Canon Rewrite, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Religious Discussion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2017-01-26
Packaged: 2018-05-03 03:18:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 28,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5274554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Covenmouse/pseuds/FlamingGeckoBits
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eliza Vakhruseva wanted very little in life: to do well as the Vault Chaplain, to stop alienating the few friends she had, and to be safe from the nuclear hell hole outside the Vault door.  But when Eliza is prompted to investigate some strange radiation readouts from the surface, she opens the door on a whole wasteland's worth of problems.  Problems which the Vault Overseer is more than willing to murder her to keep a secret.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

_“How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.”_

—Mary Shelly, _Frankenstein_. 

* * *

 

"You need to calm down." I held my hands up, palms out in a placating manner toward my raving, ranting best friend. Five minutes ago she'd come flying through my office door, already mid-rant. If it had been an old-time-y push-door, she'd have slammed it.

She had settled for slapping her hand more forcefully against the close button than necessary, waiting with a tapping foot as it closed too slowly for her patience, then jammed her access code into the control panel one number at a time until the lock clicked.

Dramatic as it was, that alone didn't make this serious. We always locked the door when we were alone together. My office was one of the few rooms in the Vault that wasn't rigged with surveillance equipment. We knew; we checked every week.

But that was when the rant had really taken off. I watched her with growing concern as she paced the five step-width of the room, back and forth, boring the proverbial hole in the rug as she yelled. I didn't understand the majority of it. Her father—the Vault Overseer—featured prominently, but that wasn't unusual either. Amata and her father hadn't gotten along well since we were eleven and he'd tried to forbid us from "associating" with one another. We didn't understand why until we found the recorder hidden in her favorite old stuffed bear. Coincidentally, he'd also forbidden us from having sleepovers.

The sleepover thing had stuck; my father agreed with the Overseer's assessment only in so much as he'd agree that all young lovers shouldn't have sleepovers at so young an age. Even if it was just "fooling around." The association thing had not. How could it? The Vault was a small, small place with an even smaller population...and none of the other kids liked either of us very much. In the end, the Overseer had relented so long as we understood such activities were improper between girls, and encouraged both of us to give the boys a chance.

We learned later that was really code for "you need to pop out babies or we're all going to die." Which only made me hate him a tiny bit more.

Still, that day's rant seemed different than Amata's usual reaction to her father's bullshit. Maybe it was the way her fingers clawed into her thick, black hair, or the sickly pallor to her skin. Maybe it was how her words were coming out, clipped and fast and so heavily mixed with Spanish that I could barely keep up.

"Calm down?" Amata scoffed, waving a stack of print outs like a weapon. "How the fuck can I possibly calm down about this?" She dropped the papers on my desk like a nuclear bomb and crossed her arms, glowering at me. At least the pacing had stopped. 

Trying to pretend like I wasn’t starting to catch her nerves like an infection, I picked the pile up, thumped them twice against my desk to straighten the edges, and began to read. 

The reports were instantly familiar. I'd spent my adolescence being mentored by the Vault maintenance manager. Everyone had expected me to follow him into that service—but when I'd taken the General Occupational Aptitude Test at sixteen, I'd been reassigned as the vault chaplain. 

It wasn't as ridiculous as it sounds. My answers on the G.O.A.T. had been pretty paranoid. What can I say? When someone asks me if I'd rat out my grandmother for asking me to murder someone, you can bet your ass I'm going to say "Yes, of course I would!" Especially when I know the Overseer is reading the tests. Who the hell wouldn't? 

Quite a few people, apparently, if the reaction to my score was any indication. Sometimes I really don't understand people. 

But this report was a pretty standard one for maintenance, one we hardly ever paid attention to because they hardly ever changed. The headline read "Sensor Grid 9" and was followed by a list of six-digit positive numbers in the right column, a list of times in the middle, and dates on the left. At the bottom was a handy graph showing minuscule fluctuations. If I remembered correctly, this was the last patch of surface sensors that were supposed to monitor radiation levels on the surface, just above where the Vault was buried kilometers beneath the earth.

I flipped the page, intending to glance over the three other graphs on the back. They should have been a comparison of the new data to last month's, then a year, and then a comparison from the day the bombs fell. All but the last was missing.

I looked again at the front of the page, making note of the date range: 10/25/2077-11/15/2077. Two days after the bombs fell. Well, that explained why the radiation levels were astronomical. I glanced at Amata, unsure why she'd given me such old—if horrific—news. She gestured crisply for me to continue reading. 

The next page was same, recorded a year later. The comparison charts were back, but there was hardly any change. The third page skipped forward thirty years, to the day the Vault's doors would have opened if everything had gone as planned. I already knew what they would say and wasn't surprised to see the readouts were still life-endingly high, though they had dropped dramatically from their initial values. That was why the doors hadn't opened, after all.

But the fourth page...

Amata snorted derisively at my frown. She plopped into the threadbare “visitor’s” armchair on the other side of my desk, her gaze angry and intense enough to bore holes in the wall. Shifting uncomfortably, I returned my attention to the papers.

October 25, 2122—fourty-five years after the bombs fell—the radiation levels were almost identical to the previous report. There had been some drop off, sure, but not nearly enough to account for the skipped fifteen years. I moved on to the fifth page, another fifteen-year skip, and the numbers had fallen down a tiny bit. But the sixth page sent them back up again. Seven dropped, eight rose, nine dropped...ten...And there was something else. Something right at the edge of my perception...

Refusing to look at Amata again, I laid the pages out in front of me and gave the number a hard look. My stomach had tied itself into a thousand knots, over and over again, long before I was willing to admit that what I was seeing was real. 

"They're identical," Amata snapped when she finally got tired of waiting. She leaned across the desk and jabbed her finger against the one dated for yesterday. "It's a five-year set just repeating over and over again. Like no one would ever notice."

"This can't be right."

"Yeah, well, it's what's in the mainframe, Eliza. You want to explain that?" She threw her hands in the air and sat back again, hard enough the chair rocked backward, threatening to tump over before it settled on all fours again. Amata didn't really seem to notice, she just closed her eyes and huffed a large breath through her nose, held it, and released it. When she opened her eyes again, her shoulders drooped. Like always, the fight seemed to drain out of her as quickly as it had sparked. 

"I'm sorry," Amata continued in a soft, breakable whisper, "I just don't understand why he would do this."

"You're jumping to an awfully large conclusion..." Was she though? Staring down at the papers I realized I wasn't so sure. 

There are only so many people with permission to access what few outdoor systems we have: Stanley Armstrong, the Maintenance Manager; the Overseer; and the Security Chief, Paul Hannon, Sr., were the three I knew of for sure. Of them, Stanley was the only I could say without a doubt would never have fudged records. Of course, while I didn’t care much for Hannon or the Overseer, I doubt they would have had any reason to fake a radiation report, either. This was strange, sure, but it wasn’t damning. 

But what Amata was implying was dangerous. No, it was beyond dangerous. "Why would anyone alter these records on purpose?"

She'd put her heels up on my desk by the time I looked up and tossed an arm over her eyes. Without removing it, she said in a low groan of a voice, "To keep us all down here, maybe? To stay in power? I don't know, E. But they can't be real. They just can't. The coincidence is just—nothing can be this perfect. This doesn’t make sense. And I can’t go to my father with it, I can’t risk that. Not if I want there to be proof left later."

"Hey." Gently, I grabbed her ankle and gave her leg a shake. Amata moved her arm enough to peer over at me, and with a start I realized how bright and watery her eyes had gone. She swallowed thickly, waiting for me to finish whatever I was going to say.

Too bad I really wasn't sure what that was. I racked my brain for some platitude which might convince her to stop. Whatever this was we didn't need it; our fragile happiness was exactly that: fragile. If we went digging through something the Overseer wanted buried—if he did, indeed, want it buried—well…it probably wouldn't have many repercussions for her. Me, on the other hand…

"Don't tell me to leave it alone," Amata warned, though she sounded more tired than angry. "If you won't help—"

"I didn't say that," I interjected quickly, feeling my resolve beginning to cave under the weight of that doe-eyed stare. "Just if we're going to do this..." I trailed off, swallowed a lump of dread, and finished, "Lets just see what we're dealing with, OK? Quietly. I'll talk to Stanley. It's probably just some bug he hasn't bothered to work out."

We both knew that was a sack of shit—Stanley Armstrong had never met a problem he didn’t throw his all into fixing the second he heard about it—but Amata didn't call me on it. She wrapped both her arms around herself like a shield and took a deep, slow breath. She let it out in equal measure, her eyes roving up to the ceiling. Finally, eyes now closed and sounding way too tired, she said, "OK, E. We'll do this your way. You're—I hope you're right."

I let my hand drift up her leg to rub gently at her calf. Amata made a soft, pleased noise and a smile tugged at the corners of my lips. "I hope so, too."

There were two appointments scheduled that afternoon. No sooner had Amata left did Beatrice Armstrong turn up with a quick rap of knuckles against the door frame to announce her arrival. 

We never talked about Beatrice. Instead, she came in with a pack of cards in one hand and fresh gossip tugging at her lips. When our sessions had first begun I’d found this somewhat entertaining, if not exactly my cup of tea. I didn't particularly care if she thought Ms. DeLoria was drinking too much—she was—or if Mr. Hanson was having an affair with Mrs. Greene—they weren't; he was having an affair with Mr. Greene. If you could call it an "affair" when both their wives were completely aware of the situation and liked it just fine. But Beatrice didn’t care to talk about anything else, and my job was to listen. So I did.

A year had gone by before I'd realized we were always talking about Beatrice. It was there, etched between what she was saying and the topics she refused to touch. She was lonely, tired of her job, tired of the monotony, searching endlessly for some reason to give a crap. The same as everyone, really, but she disguised it with mocking good cheer, weird poetry, and a mean game of gin rummy. And if that was what helped her get through her week, I didn’t much mind.

Beatrice's appointments were always followed by a visit from Gloria Mack. The difference was drastic and immediate. 

Gloria marched herself directly into my office, promptly fell into the visitor's chair and started to bawl. Dropping my feet from the desk, I grabbed a clean handkerchief from the top drawer of my desk and stood in a single, practiced motion. I held the hanky out for her as I passed, which she took with a muffled noise that might have been a "thank you" but was probably just my imagination. The door shut behind me, blocking out the noise before it really got going.

Used to be I would try offering her comfort, but Gloria didn't want that. She wanted to be alone with her sadness, and my office was one of the few guaranteed places she could have that. I wasn't sure if it helped, exactly, but I also wasn't sure what would. Besides, I couldn't force her to talk. 

Chaplains are not therapists, I'm just closest thing the Vault has had to a therapist in a very long time. I hadn't even known what a chaplain was until my father had explained. 

"It's somewhere between a priest and a therapist," he'd said after the initial shock of my assignment had worn off, "As I understand it, the military used to keep chaplains instead of priests as they specialize in counseling followers of a variety of religious paths, not just their own. A similar thought process prompted Vault-Tec to do the same when they outfitted this place." 

We'd been seated in the Overseer's office at the time, clustered around the U-shaped desk with Amata and Mr. Brotch and the Overseer himself. Instead of posting my assignment with the others in the dining hall that evening, Mr. Brotch had taken me aside just before the dinner bell rung. He told me there was an issue with my exam, one the Overseer wanted to discuss after dinner; words no one ever wants to hear.

I ate like it was my last meal, trying all the while to ignore the looks my classmates gave me when they realized my name wasn't on the board. Some seemed jealous, others perturbed. No one asked. 

Daddy and I went to the Overseer's office right after cleanup and walked right into the most uncomfortable conversation I've ever been a part of. The Overseer clearly knew my answers were bullshit. He also couldn't call me on it—not without making it obvious that his real issue was with me, not the assignment. Amata told me later that Mr. Brotch had shown the results to several people, including Stanley, specifically so the Overseer couldn't strong arm him into reassigning me before anyone knew better. G.O.A.T. results were supposedly sacred; once turned in they weren't supposed to be erased or modified. 

But the issue, as the Overseer explained, was that the chaplain position was antiquated. Religion hadn't been a concern in the Vault practically since it's inception; the first generation had largely lost their faith when the bombs fell, and the practice had trickled into non-existence over the following decades until it was a thing of history books and pre-war movies. 

Mr. Brotch's argument was that, religion aside, the people could use someone to talk to in a "safe space." My dad had agreed. As the Vault's only medical practitioner he'd been adamant about the increasing cases of depression and stress-related illness among the Vault population which could be stemmed if they were given a safe, surveillance-free area to vent. 

But I was one of the few, fully-trained maintenance crew members they had. 

But Susie Mack had been assigned in maintenance; she could replace me.

But surveillance of the vault was necessary to combat our radroach problem; the security force couldn't possibly monitor every area of the vault for infestation. 

But leaving one, tiny room without a camera or recorder wouldn't be the end of the world. 

Finally, the the Overseer admitted—grudgingly—that both sides had valid arguments. In the end, the decision had fallen to me. 

And the thing was, the reason I was fully trained was because I'd never left maintenance. Not once. 

Every vault kid is assigned a sort-of internship to start at when they turn ten. They spend a few months to a year playing gopher for one job class, then switch to another and start learning the ropes there. By the time they're sixteen, they're supposed to have taken a shot at most—if not all—of the various jobs the Vault has to offer. These don't exactly factor into the G.O.A.T., which somehow is supposed to know everything there is to know about you in ten questions or less, but it does give everyone a well rounded education on how the vault works. After all, every person plays an important role in maintaining the vault and our way of life and how can we appreciate what our neighbors do for us if we never know what their job entails?

But I had never been reassigned. Not in six long, back-breaking years. Stanley didn't have the crew to let me just fetch coffee like so many other interns. I'd been crawling through ducts, splicing wires, checking reports, logging complaints, and beating on radiators till they worked since the day I turned ten. 

It was childish to want something new just for the sake of that newness, but I latched onto the idea with both hands and wouldn't let go. 

So I'd been handed a private office, an empty chapel, a never ending parade of other people's problems....

And a feeling of abject uselessness when I couldn't solve those problems for them. I cast a bitter, worried look at the door behind me, before turning to survey my the chapel. 

It was spotless. It was always spotless. My biggest problem was dust, and I took care of that first thing every morning. Despite that, I still got out a rag and began going over everything that looked like it could remotely attract dust—old bibles, hymn books, the podium—and then took the vent down to clean as well. 

Though Stanley quite often hinted I shouldn't bother, I tried to keep up with the maintenance in my own area. It wasn't much, and it wouldn't heal the rift that had opened between us when I chose this over him—and it shouldn't even feel like I chose it over him, I chose it over maintenance...but the effect was so similar and he'd so clearly taken it that way...

The practice made me feel a tiny bit better, if only superficially.

But thinking about Stanley also made me think of my promise to Amata. There really wasn't any time like the present. And it wasn't like Gloria would be going anywhere for a while.

Finding Stanley quickly was another matter. Though the Vault was a relatively small place by the standards of the world around us—in theory, anyway, I had never been any place larger—it was still big enough to lose someone if they kept on the move. Or if they were hiding in any of the thousand nooks and crannies. Though every square inch of the place was under surveillance, everyone's movements monitored, the only people who had access to that were the Overseer and the Security Office. 

I knew from my time with him that Stanley wasn't going to be in his office. Though he had one, there was too much to do and too few maintenance personnel to allow anyone to sit there more than a few minutes each day. Stanley least of all. He hated being idle. He said it made him feel useless as though being useless was the worst thing anyone could possibly be. I was pretty sure that in his eyes “useless” was a step below “murderer.”

Stanley would be out in the Vault somewhere, that was guaranteed, and there was no better place to start than the atrium.

Vault 101 was built akin to a spider's web. Everything branched off the atrium, which served as the hub of all Vault activity. There was a nook with bookcases that served as a library, a shelf with board games, a ping-pong table, a radio that played whatever the Overseer allowed, and a handful of couches. It was the only two story room in the entire structure, with a catwalk that lined the second floor on three sides with a massive window looking into the Overseer's office on the fourth wall. 

It was also the only room that could hold the entire population at once, though there had been a time when that couldn’t have been said for any room in the Vault. Even now, the rare population-wide meeting meant we would all be crammed up against each other, uncomfortable and impatient for whatever was going on to end so we could get out of there. 

But this time of day hardly anyone would be present. This was also something new, according to my dad. When he’d been my age there hadn’t been any such thing as "night" and "day" in the vault. People worked in shifts and shared living spaces in shifts. But when I was a baby an epidemic of some kind had swept through, killing more than half of the population. No one really liked to talk about it. 

With our dwindled numbers some sense of pre-war normalcy had returned. My dad had argued that a maintained day/night cycle was beneficial for the human psyche, and the Overseer had actually listened. So the lights had been rigged, and curfews had been established. These days most people were all at work at the same time, and home by the same time, and in the atrium...well you get the picture. 

Mid-afternoon was not a high traffic period so I wasn't surprised to find the chamber devoid of most everyone save a few people reading, a couple playing chess, and a pair of guards walking the perimeter of each floor, respectively. 

The one patrolling the bottom level smiled at me.

“I thought you were booked this afternoon,” Office Gomez said as I approached.

“I am,” I replied easily. The fact that he knew my schedule so well was a little disconcerting, but I lead it slide. Security’s M.O. was ever growing more invasive, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to think about it. Neither was Amata. Of the pair of us, she was the only one with leverage to get something done. So I kept my mouth shut. She created waves with her father and Security Chief Hannon, and I made sure my door was open so she could vent afterward. That was how things worked.

“I was just looking for Stanley,” I continued before Gomez could ask anything that might give my implicit deal with Gloria Mack away. I didn't think it was against the rules to leave her alone in there—not technically—but I also didn’t care for Steve Mack to use it as another reason to rail against his wife coming to me, should he find out. He didn’t know why she needed her appointments any more than I did, but he was vocal enough in his protests that I was fairly confident it had a good amount to do with him. Or if it didn’t, he certainly thought it did, which amounted to the same. “The environmentals in the office are on the fritz again. Just needed to see about borrowing a few tools so we don’t freeze to death.”

Either Gomez bought it, or he was willing to pretend like he did. Either way, he smiled again and nodded like that was the most reasonable excuse in the world. “Still rather handy, aren’t you? Never will understand why the G.O.A.T. put you in that relic.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. Officer Gomez was among the nicest of the security personnel. He was my father’s friend, if nothing else, and put up with me the way he would any other of his friends’ kids. That wasn’t to say he liked my “frivolous” position. But at least Gomez didn’t blame me for the whole thing, which was more than I could say for a lot of my detractors. He just assumed it was the G.O.A.T. and nothing else; like how he’d been stuck with guard duty, though I’d overheard enough tipsy, after work conversations between him and my dad to know he’d have much rather been a nurse. And given his manner with everyone, he probably would have made a good one. It really wasn’t fair.

In the end I just shrugged. There wasn’t any reason or call to rail at him for the implied disparagement, and I was used to pretending like it hadn’t been my call. It was just easier that way. “Have you seen him? Stanley, I mean.”

Gomez pointed vaguely toward the Commissary. “You’re in luck.”

I turned and spotted the back of Stanley’s familiar, stained overalls through the empty archway. “Thanks,” I said to Gomez, who nodded and resumed his patrol. 

The Vault Commissary was housed in it’s own room just off the Atrium. There was an empty foyer at the front, where people could line up, bookended against two counters to either side of the room. Each counter was closed off by glass paneling, save for a slot at the bottom where items could be passed through—one counter for rations, the other for luxury items.

Most days the foyer was filled with people, lined up to get their rations or buy a few luxuries with some saved credits. Rather than just share things evenly—though there were always people pushing for just that—the vault ran with two systems of currency. Rations were absolutely basic necessities—food, mostly—and everyone got the same thing every week. Credits were points you got for completing tasks. Showing up and completing your daily shifts would get you ten points a week. Spotlessly cleaning the communal kitchen after you use it—assuming you remember to show the kitchen supervisor before someone else wrecked it—would get you three. Reporting someone for breaking the rules would get you five. So on and so forth. 

Credits were great because you could use them to get rarer items, like booze or new shoes, which weren’t really necessary but plenty of people wore them anyway.

Credits were also incredibly unfair, because if the people who handed them out didn’t like you, you had to look into other means of getting luxury items. There was a market for everything, and always an officer willing to look the other way.

Today, though, the foyer was devoid of everyone except Stanley. He was on his knees beside the door, placed straight across from the foyer’s entrance, and still within sight of Gomez as he made his rounds. 

Stanley had an entire wall panel removed, revealing the elaborate tangle of air ducts and electricity and plumbing beneath the thin interior facade. I approached slowly, making sure to walk a little more heavily so my soft slippers would make some kind of noise to alert him.

"Door jammed again?" I asked when I got closer, eyeing the manual-open mechanism positioned above where he was working, nested between a switchboard, the ethernet line, and HVAC. To our left the Commissary door stood open, revealing shelves sparsely stocked with various sundries. Stanley's bored looking assistant sat at the otherwise vacant attendant's station. They must have gone on break as soon as they realized the Commissary would be closed for repairs. As though she felt my eyes on her, Susie glanced up, flicking her gaze dismissively over me before she returned to perusing a two-hundred-year-old fashion magazine. 

"Gum," Stanley spat. Rather than replying, I leaned against the wall where I could watch the foyer’s entrance. Stanley pulled something out of the wall, tossing it over his shoulder. A tangle of cut wires, held together with wads of gum, smacked into and skidded across the floor. 

Stanley leaned out of the wall and mopped his brow with the back of one beefy, hair-laden arm. "They go through all the damn trouble of hot wiring these doors and they can't be assed to swipe some fuckin' electrical tape with their booze?" 

There wasn't a question of who 'they' were; the Tunnel Snakes. It was always the Tunnel Snakes. The self-proclaimed "gang" of three had been stealing from Commissary as long as I could remember, even before they'd had the idea to call themselves by that ridiculous name. There had to be evidence on a dozen cameras but they'd never been punished. Not once. That was what happened when two of their daddies were the chief and second-command of the security force, respectively. At this point, it was a bit of a joke. 

But their leader, Butch DeLoria, definitely knew how to splice wires properly, Stanley and I both knew it. He'd been stuck on maintenance same as me, and Stanley had trained both of us. Using the gum was just Butch's way of rubbing salt in a wound.

"When has Butch gone out of his way to do anything?" I dropped into a crouch and stuck my head into the hole Stanley had vacated, eyeing the place he'd pulled the wires from. There was a bit of corrosion on the ports, a hint of rust. When I touched the far side of the wall my fingers came back damp. "Pipes leaking again?"  
Stanley scoffed. I heard the familiar sound of an aerosol can going off, then he pressed something soft into my hand. The distinct scent of 904 steel cleaner hit my nose a second later. On instinct, I took the rag and started cleaning the ports as best I could while he dug around his tool box for replacement parts. "When aren't they?" 

I didn't have an answer for that. Things broke of course; nothing in this world is permanent. Except, apparently, the fallout. 

But the Vault...Sometimes the Vault felt eternal, like it had when I was a small kid and hadn't yet learned the horror of our situation. The Vault was home. Home didn't just fall apart around your ears. Home wasn't the last thin protection you had against the hellfire raging outside. Home was just...home. 

Then I'd turned ten. Stanley tried to hide the truth from us at first, but kids are often more perceptive than adults give them credit for. Butch and I had learned quickly what rust meant; learned how swiftly the systems we depended on would deteriorate if left to their own devices. We learned how meager our supplies actually are. 

The Vault was never meant to last forever. The manufacturing levels—populated almost entirely by automated equipment and robots—kept the recycling process neatly out of sight and thought. Computers printed plastic items, grew hydraulic foods, and compiled all of it into weekly deliveries as ordered by the Commissary. But materials could only be recycled so many times, and metals couldn't be printed at all. Once I had asked Stanley if we could use plastic parts instead. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it could give us time until a better solution could be found. He'd given me a strangely haunted look and changed the subject without answering. 

I hadn't thought about that for years. Why did it occur to me now?

There was long enough of a pause that I'd just decided Stanley wouldn't continue, and was wracking my brain for a way to 'casually' bring up the reports, when he offered: "Whole system's been givin' me a mess of trouble for months, now. Could be the well's been contaminated. Could be the purifier got limed up again. Could be the pipes are just rusted on through and, well, you know the score about the raws." 

I nodded and exchanged the rob for a a nest of wires. Working almost on instinct, I quickly detangled them and began to plug them into the connectors strand by color-coded strand. "How bad?"

"Maybe a year. Maybe less."

Cold seized my gut as I twisted around to stare at him. The implication was obvious, and yet for a second my brain didn't want to wrap itself our the meaning. "A year till what, exactly?"

Stanley's mouth set into a thin line, but he didn't look at me. His gaze was fixed entirely on a wrench he held, turning it over and over in his perpetually sweaty palms. "I never came to see you in that fancy office of yours, Lizzie Girl."

For a second I almost thought he was sorry. We hadn't parted on the best of terms, me and Stanley. He'd trained me as his replacement, one of the few people in this Vault who'd ever seemed to want me around...and I'd betrayed him. Though he'd never said it in so few words, we both knew it was true. 

My heart sank further as Stanley finished, "Don't think I'm inclined to spill my guts in this hallway, either."

"If it's about the Vault—" I began; he cut me off with a shake of his head.

"Overseer knows," Stanley said, dismissing the topic with a wave of his wrench. He jerked his chin toward the wires. "Still remember a thing or two I taught you, though. Always had a good memory."

"Thanks," I muttered. Tipping back on my heels, I got out of Stanley's way as he reached up to flip the power switch back on and hit the door control. There was a brief grinding noise before the door slid down. Another tap of the panel sent it back up again, and third back down with only minor complaints. That was as smooth as anything ever got around here. 

He began to gather up his supplies, and after a hesitation I started to help. "Stanley..."

"You got out," he said, voice low but tone firm. Though his eyes were trained on his work, I couldn't shake the notion that he was watching me for some kind of reaction as he continued. "You got to do something more fun, more...interesting. Hell, I'll give you it makes a bit of difference around here. There's a more than a few people happier for having someone who'll listen to their bullshit."

He sighed, then, and an edge of wistfulness crept into his voice. "I used to talk your ear off myself, back before it got all official-like. You remember that?"

I nodded. He hadn't at first; ten was far too young for camaraderie with a grown man. But as I'd gotten older and came to see the Vault for what it really was, Stanley's tongue had loosened like the slow winning of a rusted screw from it's socket. I knew he was worried about the Vault—everyone knew. He had the medical history to prove it; filled with ulcers and migraines and a lack of sleep so profound he shouldn't have been let anywhere near power tools. But I was one of the few who really understood.

He'd shown me the failing life support systems, the processors he'd practically glued together, the over-flowing sewage tanks deep underground. This place was dying, and it was going hard and fast. And if what Amata had said was true...

But Stanley didn't seem to notice my distraction. He sighed again, and flipped the toolbox closed with what seemed an unnecessary amount of force. "But you got bigger problems these days, Lizzie Girl. You don't need old Stanley adding to them."

I laughed. "Oh come on, Stanley, when has that ever stopped you? We don't have to keep doing this, you know. We can still talk."

His gaze met mine, and the laughter died on my lips. There was something cold and serious in that look, and far older than Stanley should have been. Sadder. Beaten down. For all his medical history, I'd never thought of him as defeated. Not until that moment. It seemed like he might have said something more, but just as his lips parted the clomp of boots marching toward us echoed from the atrium. Stanley picked up the half-forgotten wall panel and popped it back into place. "Don't you have your own job to do?"

"I could still help—"

"That's Susie's place, not yours."

The urge to point out that Susie was behind the now-closed Commissary door, likely stuffing magazines and candy into her pockets, was strong. Instead, I rose from my crouch just as a new security officer made a round outside the foyer door. A shift change must have happened sometime in the last few minutes. The man gave me a suspicious look and slowed.

"Sure, Stanley," I said after a long, awkward wait. "It was nice talking to you."

A grunt was his only reply.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I failed to mention it in chapter one, but I wanted to clarify (it's in my tags) that this piece is an "Alternate Reality." In other words, the overall plot will be similar to the game, but I have expanded on, altered, and flat out dismissed some of the game's set up. That was probably pretty clear in chapter one alone, but it definitely gets a'rolling here.

I managed to make it out of the atrium before anxiety struck. Instead of answers, I'd only found more questions; the sort of questions that brought on nausea so strong I found myself racing for the nearest toilet.

Purified water was essential to Vault life--Hell, it had been essential to civilized life long before the Great War and its bombs had destroyed everything. Because water itself, while necessary to all living creatures, doesn’t play favorites. Parasites, viruses, bacteria; they all thrive in unfiltered water.

Without a working purifier the Vault would be exposed to a host of diseases we had never needed to deal with. Ever. Our parents, our grandparents, and their parents before them had all grown up in the Vault--separated from the outside world and its contaminates.

And that didn't even begin to account for the radiation no doubt seeped into the water table.

If the purifier shut down--I didn't want to think about it. It was a nightmare.

The bathroom was empty when I burst through the door and into the nearest stall. I didn't throw up, but I locked the stall door and tucked myself between the toilet and the tiled wall just in case. Bringing my knees up close, I wrapped my arms around them and buried my face against my knees.

What would be worse? To open the doors and step into a world so baked in rads we'd fry instantly, or to be forced by our own dehydration to drink tainted, poisonous water as our bodies boiled from the inside out?

I didn't know. I didn't--

I needed to think about this rationally. Forcing my body to cooperate, I took a deep breath in through my nose and held it to a count of ten before releasing it through my mouth in a slow, measured 'whoosh.'

Once.

Twice.

Thrice.

The nausea quelled; the panic flooding my veins evened into a nervousness that still left my hands trembling...but I could work around that. I could think. That would be enough.

Slowly, with more effort than should have been necessary, I leaned my head back until it found the wall behind me. The ceiling was patchy with rust. That wasn't a surprise, but it also wasn't something I'd paid particular interest to in a long time.

"You're not supposed to fall apart," I muttered to the Vault. The only answer was a creaking of pipes and the slow dripping of a leaky faucet.

I picked myself up and made it to the bank of sinks before anyone else came in. Janice Wilkins paused in the doorway as I wet a washcloth and pressed it to my face. She stood there a moment, just inside the mirror's reflections, frowning at me before she crossed on to a stall to do her business. Janice wasn't a bad person; I could practically see her questioning whether or not she ought to ask if I was OK, and the subsequent decision to leave me alone. Maybe I would have resented that once. Now I was only grateful.

Tossing the cloth into the laundry bin as I passed—where it would make it's way down the shoot to the service levels, be laundered, and sent back on up dry and ready for re-use—I left the room without embarrassing us both by acknowledging her presence.

This time, I made my way toward the chapel at a sedate pace, hands tucked into the pockets of my standard issue vault suit and eyes on the floor. As I walked, I began to count the missing screws and patches of rust, the places were panels were missing off walls or where lights flickered.

I thought I'd known the score. I thought I had understood—and I had, in theory. But the actual, physical reality that my home was a hair's breadth away from dying? I hadn't understood anything. I still didn't really, because Stanley had refused to explain. It wasn't like this was common knowledge——

I stopped dead in the middle of the hall.

None of this was common knowledge. If people knew I would have heard something, wouldn't I? Maybe it was hubris to assume everyone who used my services told me everything...but a lot of them told me more than I'd ever expected when I took the position. The first few months had been spent in a constant state of bewilderment as people who wouldn't give me the time of day outside that office poured out their heart and souls, so long as I seemed a passive listener. At the very least, Beatrice would have said something; she was the biggest gossip in the Vault. This would be a gold mine for her.

They didn't know. That was the only real answer; the majority of the population had no idea. Stanley knew, and he'd told the Overseer. It was the Overseer's job to make sure that sort of thing got fixed, but if Stanley couldn't fix it, who could?

Almost instantly, a list of names began to populate the back of my head…It wasn't very long.

There was Paulie Hannon—the only member of the Tunnel Snakes who was worth a damn, and a genius who would have been certified if certification still happened. He'd been assigned to the sciences, which meant a general education on every science-y job the Vault had until he picked his own specification. The last I'd heard he was spending a lot of time with the reactor. That didn't exactly translate to working on a purifier, but Paulie had never been given a mechanical problem he couldn't solve.

Then there was my dad, James Vakhrushev, and his assistant-turned-colleague, Jonas Palmer. Both were medical primarily, but since Jonas had finally taken on the full title of “doctor” they'd spent more time alternating between the clinic and other projects. I didn't know what kind of projects--whenever I asked the technical jargon quickly made me wish I hadn't.

It wasn't that I didn't care, it was just...computers. And medicine. And oozy medical stuff that made me want to hurl. You could waxed on for hours about HVAC problems and wiring, and how to properly buff a floor and I'd be right there with you. Computers and medicine were not my areas. I was lost, and somehow it had never seemed all that important to find my way through.

While medicine didn't really align with fixing a purifier, either, the Overseer could have asked my dad or Jonas to look at treating issues with the water supply itself.

I was so lost in thought I didn't hear the footsteps pounding up the hall behind me until someone skidded around the far corner. I caught a glimpse of a perfectly coiffed pompadour and a studded leather jacket before Butch DeLoria crashed into me, sending us both sprawling across the unforgiving metal floor.

Pain shot through my elbows, hands, and knees but I managed to keep my head from bouncing off the floor—barely. "What the fuck?” moaned Butch, sprawled half on top of me.

Despite the pain still throbbing in my bones, I shot an elbow backward—straight into his stomach—and barked, “Get off!”

Butch grunted and rolled off to one side. “Bitch,” he spat as he clawed his way back onto his feet. “The fuck were you doing?”

“You ran into me, asshole,” I snapped before I could think better of it.

Butch and I had been fighting as long as I could remember. I couldn’t think of a single time when we hadn’t been at each other’s throats, unless you counted the uneasy truce we’d held during our time with Stanley. Even then, that had only been true when directly in the man’s presence. Then Stanley would leave, and we’d be back to the name calling and petty pranks as though they’d never ceased.

It wasn’t that I hated him—you had to actually care about someone to hate them. Butch had decided long ago that he hated me, or at least that was how it seemed. Sometimes it even felt like he went out of his way to antagonize me. Maybe, again, that was hubris. But it also didn’t feel wrong.

I climbed back onto my feet, though my knees protested strongly against holding me upright. I didn’t want to be on the ground with him over me like that; it didn’t feel safe.

“You were standing in the middle of the fucking hallway,” he said with a wild gesture back the way he’d come, “What the hell, E? Did someone turn you into a statue and I missed it?”

“If you saw me standing there, why didn’t you go around?”

‘This is stupid!,’ a voice in the back of my mind raged, ‘Stop, dumbass! Stop now!’

I may not have hated Butch, but I recognized that he was dangerous. The gang he’d founded when we were kids was small, sure—there’d only ever been the three members, and no matter how much Freddie Gomez chased at their heels there would only ever be three—but they were still a gang. Just like in the old pre-war movies, Butch used his cronies to extort credits and belongings from other Vault dwellers. You either paid them or “accidents” started happening. Sometimes it was as simple and petty as your door’s passcode being reset, or you might find your valuables mysteriously missing or broken when you came home from shift. Other times, you might get cornered in dark hallways and beaten until you gave them what they wanted.

Still, if I’d learned anything from my dealings with the Tunnel Snakes it was that there wasn’t any good response—only the response you could live with. Showing them your fear would just end with them singling you out for more terrible treatment until they found what broke you. Standing up to them wouldn’t make them stop either, but I thought it made them pick their battles a little more selectively.

I set my mouth into a firm line and prepared to stand my ground. We were in a main corridor, after all, and he’d clearly been running from something. Surely he’d back down.

“You know, Butch, if you need to talk so badly you could just schedule an appointment. I think my Friday’s open.”

The offer seemed to catch him off guard; for a moment, at least. Then he barked a sour note of laughter. “What? You really think I wanna spend my precious time whining at you like the rest of those losers? Fucking hell, bull-dyke, I got more self respect than that.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed—loudly enough to echo off the metal walls encasing us—and gestured to his hair. “Since when? If you had an inch of self respect you’d lay off the grease. You pollute the water supply every time you shower.”

His left eye twitched; insulting Butch’s carefully manicured pompadour was never wise. “Like you’d know anything about fashion,” he sneered, stepping a little closer. We were eye to eye now, with his chin ducked, and there was no trace of the tell-tale smirk that usually accompanied his twisted sense of humor. “You or your carpet munching bitch of a girlfriend.”

A hot flush crept under my skin. That wasn’t the worst insult I’d ever heard; not even the worst thing Butch had ever said to my face. But he usually said it about me. Bringing Amata into this was low, even for him.

And there it was, that fucking smirk. He closed the last few millimeters of distance between us, our foreheads brushing against one another. I could practically smell the tension rippling off him, hot and musky and filled with the need to hit.

And it didn’t matter, because he’d brought Amata into it.

“What’s the matter, Butchy?” I practically purred. “Awful lot of focus on the lesbian today. Did your momma finally make it through all the men on hand?”

I almost didn’t blame him for punching me.

Almost.

 

“How do you get yourself into these messes?”

Jonas turned my face up by the chin so he could better examine the bruise already blossoming over my left eye and cheek. Whatever Butch’s problem had been he’d left me with a headache, a good amount of bruising, and a busted lip. That was fine; I’d broken his nose. We were even.

Except where the authorities were concerned. Security had swarmed in shortly after the first few punches were thrown—we were in a main corridor, after all, and they had to at least pretend to do their jobs. Butch had been hauled away to medical immediately, dripping blood and cursing all the while. I was taken to security. They’d thrown me in a cell to “calm down” and refused to answer any questions until Jonas had finally shown up with a medical kit.

“Butch started it,” I protested. “He hit me. I was just defending myself!”

“You don’t have to explain to me,” Jonas said, softly enough the guard might not have heard.

Steve Mack was watching the entire procedure from the other side of the bars, an ugly smile tugging at his lips as he drawled, “Sure he did. Butch always starts it. Funny how you still managed to break his nose.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I jerked my head out of Jonas’ grip to scowl at Officer Mack. “You don’t have to start a fight to win it.”

“She’s got you there, Steve,” Jonas cut in quietly, though his hand was firm when he took my chin again and forced me to look the way he needed. There was a rag in his other hand, stinking of unidentifiable medicines. He began to dab at the bruising, gentle but precise. I tried not to squirm.

“Just seems awfully convenient you never seem to start anything.” I didn’t have to look to register the sneer in Officer Mack’s voice. “How many fights have we pulled you out of? Seems to me you’re just as much an animal as DeLoria.”

“That’s out of line,” Jonas snarled. He left off with the rag, whirling to glare at the Officer. I gaped. Jonas was always so gentle and polite with everyone, no matter what they said to him—and they’d said an awful lot over the years. He was a doctor, after all, and doctors had the unfortunate job of telling people things they really didn’t want to hear. I’d seen him keep a straight face as people screamed obscenities about him, his mother, even his entire family line all the way back to the Vault founders. Jonas never snapped.

But he had. He defended me. Something deep inside of me warmed a little, and despite the throbbing headache settling behind my eyes, I smiled.

The whole thing was ruined when he added, “They’re children, Steve. And maybe if you didn’t turn a blind eye to your son and his friends, they wouldn’t go around attacking defenseless girls.”

I bristled. It was involuntary; I knew Jonas was trying to help. Still, “defenseless” was not an adjective I’d use to describe myself, and I didn’t much like the feel of it. Officer Mack seemed to find it just as wrong, though his response was laughter.

“Defenseless?” Mack shook his head, his massive chest still heaving with silent giggles. “Dr. Palmer, I know you’re a smart man. Gotta be to deal with all this medicinal mumbo-jumbo. But defenseless?”

Officer Mack jabbed an accusing finger in my direction. “This one broke Wally’s arm last year. You remember that? Snapped it clean. She’s given Paulie more black eyes than I can count, and I’m not even going to go into DeLoria’s history with her. I know you’re so far up Vakhrushev’s ass you’ll defend just about anything, but come on. Don’t be that guy.”

Jonas scowled. “I notice you didn’t address the boys’ actions toward her.”

“No. I didn’t.” Mack lifted his chin a little higher, making it clear that no matter how much he called for Jonas not to be ‘that guy’, Mack had no problem being him. No problem at all.

“Can I leave yet? I have work to do.”

They both startled, as though they’d already forgotten I was sitting there. Then Officer Mack scowled in my direction. “Yeah, work like my wife’s appointment, right?”

It was everything I could do not to wince. Of course he would have realized his wife had an appointment today. Of course I’d get into a fight with Butch when I was supposed to be counseling her. Of. Fucking. Course.

He sneered at me and shook his head in disgust. “Yeah. You can get back to your work, Chaplain. Get out of my cell.”

“So glad I came all the way over here, then,” Jonas said, giving Officer Mack a cold look. He tossed his supplies quickly into his carrying satchel and grabbed my arm, hefting me to my feet.

“Would you rather I keep her?”

“We’re going, we’re going,” Jonas grumbled as he propelled me toward the door. I managed to recover in time to clear the security office on my own power, but Jonas didn’t let go of my arm until we were halfway back to the atrium.

“You’re coming to the clinic,” he informed me, without preamble.

I decided not to argue.

Jonas dropped my arm when we hit the atrium proper. That didn’t stop people from giving me sidelong looks as they took in my bruised face, and the droplets of blood on my uniform. I straightened a bit, pulling every inch of the considerable height I had on most of them, and lifted my chin.

Jonas snickered so faintly I barely heard it. When we’d passed again into the halls, he shook his head. “You are a handful,” he said in such a caring tone the edge went right off his words.

“I have my moments,” I agreed. Deflating a little as we turned a corner, I cut a glance toward him, noting the bags beneath his eyes and a tightness at the corners of his mouth I hadn’t noticed before. “Is everything OK?”

Jonas snorted indignantly. “I just pulled you out of the security office and set Butch’s nose. Again. I know you aren’t starting it, but can’t you two just…get along?”

“Ask Butch! He’s never really given me that option, you know.” The whine in my voice was off putting, even to me.

Besides, in this case I had deserved it—at least a little. Shame crawled up my throat, burning my cheeks and ears. I turned my face away, pretending to inspect the walls or…something. When I dared look back I found Jonas watching me, an amused half-smile tugging at his lips. The heat under my skin redoubled.

Chuckling, Jonas tucked his free arm about my shoulders. I slumped gratefully against him. For a moment I thought he’d try to wheedle an explanation out of me. I steeled myself for the inevitable lecture and disappointment, even as I opened my mouth to start a defense.

Jonas cut me off. “Sometimes we have to make our own options,” he said, his voice tired and low. And worried. Once again the feeling that something was wrong—deeply, horribly wrong—settled around me, as solid as Jonas’ arm. I frowned and glanced at him again.

Jonas was only six years my senior, though that was hard to remember when he insisted on acting like an uncle. Not that I’d ever had a real uncle to compare him with. But looking at him then, he looked both younger and older than he was.

Something was definitely wrong, but it was something that had gone wrong recently. It had to be. I saw Jonas every day—our families took meals together. We lived next door to each other. Had he seemed this stressed this morning? Yesterday? Suddenly, I couldn’t remember…but I didn’t think so.

Yet, I had already learned so many things today that weren’t what I thought they were. It was starting to feel overwhelming, exhausting, and though Jonas was on my list of people to question…I really didn’t want to. Not right now.

Without knowing what I was going to say, I opened my mouth and let fly the first thing that popped into it: “Are we related?”

Jonas stopped.

He blinked owlishly at me from behind his nuka-bottle glasses, clearly taken a-back. As the silence stretched between us I debated shrugging his arm off and running as far away as the Vault would allow. That would be better than facing the consequences of that question.

Why the hell had I even asked? I’d thought about it, of course. I’d thought about it hundreds—thousands of times since I’d gotten old enough to question the oddity of my situation. And I’d sworn I would never, ever ask.

Footsteps sounded further down the hall. The sharp, crisp clip-clap of boots against metal seemed to snap Jonas out of his shocked paralysis. He grabbed me by the forearm and practically drug me the rest of the way down the corridor to the B-block stairs.

The clinic was a few residential blocks out from the stairwell, and if I had to judge by the dark windows we passed, most people weren’t home yet, though dinner bell was quickly approaching. That was nice. The fewer people who witnessed Jonas hauling me through the halls like a misbehaving child, the better.

I could have jerked myself free, but I didn’t. I just tried my best to keep up as we swept through the clinic’s open doors and continued our trek right on through to the office Jonas shared with my father. Thankfully, Daddy wasn’t there.

Jonas let me go the instant we crossed the threshold, then turned to shut and lock the door.

I stumbled away from him, rubbing my arm though it didn’t hurt. While his grip had been firm, Jonas clearly wasn’t trying to be cruel. Still, I didn’t know what this drama was for and I was scared it was only going to add to the shitfest that was my day.

“Look, I’m sorry OK?” I blurted, right over top him saying, “I’m sorry, Eliza—”

We both stopped. He turned to look at me and sighed. After chucking his bag into a corner, Jonas removed his glasses and rubbed the corners of his eyes with one hand. Finally, he moved toward the chair positioned by the room’s single desk and fell into it so heavily it creaked in protest. “I didn’t want to talk about this out there,” he explained slowly. “Not where someone could hear.”

“Someone can always hear,” I said, scoffing. My stomach, already twisted into knots over every other revelation today, twisted a bit further. “What would anyone care if we discussed bloodlines?”

Relationships in the Vault are…complicated. Almost everyone is related to everyone else—closely. That’s what happens when you spend two hundred years locked underground with no fresh genetics to add to the proverbial pool. While things weren’t so dire that first cousin needed to marry first cousin, it was almost guaranteed we’d be marrying on the third or fourth tier. Most of us, anyway.

To keep the problem managed, people kept fairly close tabs on how the trees overlapped. Most people, anyway. My father had never mentioned anything or anyone, and no one had ever made themselves known to me. It was a problem I’d tried approaching with Daddy several times, and after being shut down with more and more irritation…I’d learned to stop asking. I’d never even dared bring it up with someone else.

“It would matter,” Jonas mumbled as he watched himself clean his glasses with the hem of his lab coat. He sucked in another deep breath through his nose, pressing his lips together as he held it for a long minute before exhaling in a ‘whoosh.’ He glanced up at me, though I knew I’d be nothing but a blur to him without his glasses. “Where did this come from?”

Before I could figure out where to begin, Jonas shook his head sharply. “No. That’s a stupid question. I’m sorry. I…I guess I’m just surprised you waited so long.”

Something didn’t quite ring true to his tone. Frowning, I pulled myself away from the wall I’d been leaning against and approached the thin steel stool set across the desk from him. It wasn’t half so comfortable as the visitor’s seat in my office, but it wasn’t really supposed to be. My office was meant to comfort people. Theirs was meant to be clinic, cold.

I sat down, shivering slightly as the chill of the metal bit through the thin leather of my uniform. Instinct had started this mess, so instinct could damn well finish it. “Nobody talks about my family,” I blurted, the words tumbling free more quickly than I could keep up with. “I mean, they do. Obviously they talk about me, sometimes, and about Daddy. But that’s it. Just us. There aren’t any other Vakhrushevs or Vakhrushevas anywhere. You and NeNe, you’re the only ones who treat us like family. Hell, NeNe lets me call her ‘NeNe’! I know no one’s ever said you were but—”

The roadblock was there before I knew it was coming, and I crashed hard against it; against the one sentence I couldn’t say.

I didn’t have to. Jonas—wonderful, patient Jonas who loved me so well—said it for me: “But you don’t look like your father.”

I swallowed thickly and nodded, unable to do anything else.

It was only the truth; I didn’t look a damned thing like Daddy. Sure, our pale blue eyes were a similar shape, a similar shade, but that was where it began and ended. It wasn’t that we were precise opposites, either—we were just…different; too different.

Daddy was slender and frail where I was naturally broad and strong. His hair was straight as a board, silver and fine. In the oldest of our photographs, it had been a dull chestnut. My hair was a heavy mass of tight, springy curls that some called dark auburn and others termed red; both were accurate in the right light.

Daddy had always been useless with my hair. NeNe—Jonas’ grandmother, Lucy—had been the one to teach me how to wrap it at night and the kind of products to buy from commissary. She would still plait it in elaborate styles whenever I’d hold still long enough.

And Daddy was pale with perfectly clear skin, where I boasted a complexion so coated in freckles there were places where you would be hard pressed to find the warm sepia tones underscoring their frenzy. In point of fact, my skin was closer in shade to Jonas’ and NeNe’s than to my father’s. My nose was roughly the same as Nene’s nose, my chin similar to Jonas’.

None of that proved a case for relation. Of course it didn’t. It was a stupid, childish fancy. And for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why I’d brought it up.

“I understand, you know,” Jonas cut in to my thoughts. He put his glasses back on and reached across the desk for my hand. I let him have it, looking, once again, at the similarities there. “I mean, not that I’ve been there just…”

He cleared his throat when I looked up at him. “Lizzie,” he said, and squeezed my hand, “No. We aren’t related by blood, but you are like my kid sister. You know that, right?”

“Don’t you mean a niece?” I asked, trying to smile as my heart sunk. It got easier when he smiled back, a soft chuckle underscoring the expression.

“I ain’t that old,” he chided with a familiar, teasing lilt.

“Sure act it, sometimes.”

Shaking his head, Jonas sat back in his chair as he released my hand. “Not that I mind but…why ask this now?”

Slumping forward, I folded my arms on the desk and settled my chin into them. “I don’t know,” I muttered. My eyes hurt, and my head was still pounding from the fight, so I closed them as I continued, “Just a lot of shit on my mind I guess. Didn’t exactly plan to jump you with it, just—Things have been so confusing today.”

“Confusing? How so?” Jonas prompted.

Could I tell him? There was every possibility he already knew, of course. I’d already considered that, before Butch and Security derailed everything. I had all but decided to talk to him and Daddy about the purifier.

And at the end of the day, did I really have a choice?

But I stopped myself before the words came. I stopped, and glanced toward the camera in the front left corner of the office, directly above the window looking out over the empty clinic.

The little red light that should have indicated a live status…

…was off.

Jonas followed my frown, then pulled what I had presumed to have been a pen fully out of his labcoat pocket. It was thin and metallic, had a button on top, and no nib at the bottom. There wasn’t even a conical point. “EMP remote,” he said softly, like he was still afraid someone might hear. “It causes several minutes of flicker before cutting the devices in the room. We’ve been using it for a while now.”

My surprise must have looked hilarious, because Jonas barely muffled his laugh as he replaced the remote in his pocket. “We all have our ways,” he said. “What’s wrong, Lizzie?”

Swallowing the surprise and irritation, I told him.

I started with Amata’s rant that morning, and continued all the way through Stanley’s confession and my subsequent musings on the fallout should the purifier die entirely. Jonas remained quiet the entire time, not questioning anything or even seeming particularly bothered. When the words finally trickled to a stop, he ran his teeth over his bottom lip and said, “You need to leave this alone.”

 "What?"

"You need to leave this alone,” he repeated, once again stressing ‘you’ just enough to lend it importance. “This isn’t the sort of fight you can afford.”

A flicker of something flashed across his face——annoyance? Anger? Hatred? ...guilt? Whatever it was, it didn't seem directed at me. Jonas pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with one forefinger and looked me in the eye.

"I'm not confirming anything," he said in that careful tone people use when they are confirming something and just aren't brave enough to admit it, "But if what you suspect is true—any part of it—it is just as clear someone doesn't want the everyone to know. Maybe not anyone."

"So I should just——what? Ignore it? Pray the problem goes away?" My throat felt dry. I tried to swallow it away, and winced.

Jonas' mouth twisted into a sad parody of a smile. "Isn't that what a chaplain is supposed to do?"

When I didn't laugh even that paltry attempt faded like it had never existed at all. There was a long, uncomfortable pause——too long. I began to wonder how much time we'd have before someone became suspicious over the security blackout.

Just as quickly, I decided it didn't much matter. If security came to investigate a spotty camera, finding me in my own father's office wouldn't be unusual. There were ways to explain my presence, if not the near palpable tension between me and one of my closest friends.

Besides, it wasn't like they needed an excuse to arrest me. I might even welcome it right now.

Jonas was the first to break. "I'm not saying this doesn't bear investigation, Lizzie. Just——Let Amata handle it. She can get away with this. You...things are different for you."

“Different?”

He waved a hand, like blowing the question away as he distractedly raked his other through his short-cropped curls. “Like today. You know.”

I felt like I'd been punched.

The strange tension between myself, and the Overseer and his security force had been a fixed point in my life as far back as I could remember. I was always the one singled out to be made an "example of" when we kids pulled a prank——until I'd learned to distance myself from such things. The Overseer made numerous, thinly veiled pronouncements about my dire future, referred to me only "the brat" whenever he thought I couldn't hear, never let the slightest of my infractions go while other kids got mere slaps on the wrist. Other people, parents of my school mates most notably, kept a distance from me and their children further still. I was the vault pariah in a lot of circles, when I wasn't on the job——I knew that, even if I didn't know why.

And everyone refused to acknowledge it.

I was told, over and over again, that I was just imagining slights, being dramatic, being paranoid. "No one has it out for you," Jonas himself had snapped when I was fifteen and had spent my first night in detention.

I'd only wanted to use the bathroom. It was after curfew, and the communal restroom on our block had been closed for maintenance the whole week, so I'd gone to the one upstairs. An officer had been waiting when I came out again.

Jonas had been the one to come get me——Daddy was working late on some project or another he couldn't tear himself away from. He'd gone on to inform me that I should have comm'ed an officer for permission before leaving the apartment. The whole incident was my fault; I'd known the rules.

Maybe he saw it, the way anger boiled my veins and clawed like acid up my throat. Jonas winced away, pushing himself back from his desk. "I didn't mean——"

"Don’t," I snapped, and he shut his mouth. Getting angry at him wasn't going to get me what I wanted; I knew that. And still I stood so fast the stool toppled behind me. The noise of it was still echoing as I managed to reign myself in, glowering at my self-professed ‘brother’.

"Why?" I demanded, not even sure which part of the past hour I was questioning. It was too much in such a short time. My head reeled, dizzy again and so confused.

Jonas’ mouth opened, closed, opened again…then set into a hard line. He didn’t want to say? That was fine. I didn’t want to hear his excuses, anyway.

Shaking my head, I turned and stalked from the office. He called after me, but the sound was distant and wrong.

My steps grew quick. My stride grew long. Soon I was nearly jogging through the halls, taking the turns seemingly by random. I felt sick, but not the same way as before. This wasn’t a need to throw up. This was a knowledge, deep and clear and unsettling, that there was something wrong with me. Whatever it was, everyone else seemed to able to see it…everyone but me.

As I rounded another corner a familiar door came into sight. It wasn’t like any other door in the hall—it was manual, for starters, with a huge wheel at the center to open it, and it stood on hinges that would drag the door into the hall rather than sliding into the wall. The maintenance shafts.

I guess subconsciously I knew I’d intended to do this since talking to Stanley, but I hadn’t put much thought into it. There wasn’t any time like the present, though.

Refusing to care how many cameras witnessed me, I grabbed the lock and began pulling it inch-by-rusted-inch to the left. The door squealed like a dying rat. Eventually it gave way, revealing a pitch-black stairwell descending into the lower maintenance levels.

“1…2…3…” I counted faintly, under my breath. On five, a handful of lights, placed at widely-spaced intervals, flickered to life. The gave off only the dullest of glows, but it was enough. It would have to be.

I swung the door closed behind me, though there was no locking mechanism on this side, and continued down the stairwell at a far more sedate pace. My right hand closed around my naked left wrist, where my pip-boy had been for so many years.

I’d been given on the miniaturized, wrist-bound computers when I turned ten. It was an extremely old, beat up model that Stanley had refurbished just for me. At first I had been delighted. None of the other kids got pip-boys so young. We only had a few of them, after all, no one where near enough for everyone in the Vault. But I’d soon realized the pip-boy was more of a burden than a privilege.

It had been allowed to me not because I was responsible or special, but because I was slotted for maintenance duty. The pip-boy was essential equipment; it contained maps, repair notes, a direct line to security in case of trouble of a tunnel collapse, a flashlight, schematics…whole tons of things. It was also heavy as hell. That had been difficult to deal with when I was ten, but I’d gradually gotten so used to having it on me at all times that the weight had seemed like another part of me.

When I’d changed jobs, I’d had to give the pip-boy back. That was like cutting off a limb. Though it had been three years since I last wore the thing, the absence still felt wrong…especially here.

This level, between the factory and farms, and the vault housing was considered low-priority for lighting. There were more fixtures above me, but most of the bulbs had been re-purposed long ago, since all the maintenance personnel had light sources on their person. That meant less recourse consumption, but it also meant a good place for the radroaches to gain a foothold.

I kept an ear out for the tell-tale scuttle of legs as I reached the final landing and turned toward the water purification room.

All the while, my mind reeled. How could he? Why would he?

That was the thing that bothered me the most of all of this. What was the damn point? An investigation that had started with—apparently—faked radiation reports had turned into a problem with the water supply, had become a conspiracy to drive me insane. That was what this felt like; that I was unjustifiably paranoid, always thinking people were out to get me. But is it really paranoia if everyone else really does hate you?

I turned a sharp corner and relaxed a little as a familiar, brighter glow lit the tunnel ahead of me. A moment late I reached the small alcove, containing a desk, a toolbox, and small electric lantern. I unhooked the lantern from its power cable, grabbed the toolbox, and continued forward.

My target was only a few more corners away, and the distance took less time than I remembered to cross. In my fury to get down here, I’d covered ground at a pace that left my legs aching. Ignoring the slight discomfort, I dropped the toolbox noisily at the foot of the purifier and crouched to flip the locks. The box opened with a rusty creak, revealing three tiers of tools and basic repair essentials.

A quick dig around found a small flashlight, a phillip’s head screwdriver, and a rag to wipe the grease away. I flicked the flashlight on and set it between my teeth as I went to work opening the machine up. The loud whirring meant it was on, which would limit my inspection range and present a danger, but I couldn’t risk turning it off. I’d just have to be careful.

As I worked, I continued to lecture myself.

Think, Liz, just slow down and think about this. There has to be some kind of reason behind this bullshit. No one is fucking with you just to fuck with you. There has to be a reason…

So what did all three things have in common?

The radiation reports measured radiation levels in the air—duh. They didn’t really mean much of anything, except that we were dead if we opened the vault door, and almost no one paid them any attention anymore. They weren’t of consequence.

The purifier burning out was a problem that would affect the entire Vault. Without a way to get fresh water we could all die in a multitude of horrible ways, and the Overseer didn’t even have the balls to warn people it was coming.

Jonas’ implication that he knew I was being shafted and only pretended I wasn’t…didn’t impact anything but my trust in him, and basically everyone else who’d told me it was all in my head. A-K-A, everyone I’d ever met. That was fucked up. It was more than fucked up. It also didn’t impact anyone except me.

I huffed a deep breath through my nose as I pried the exterior paneling loose and set it aside. The inside of the purifier was an absolute mess; jumbled wires and ancient bolts, and little lights that should have all been on but half had burned out decades ago. Squatting, I pushed back a group of wires and twisted around until I could see whether or not the exterior pipes had frozen up. It happened, sometimes.

Loathe as I was to toss out this whole conspiracy thing, it didn’t seem to fit the whole picture. The other two, on the other hand…they had Stanley in common.

They were both, technically, maintenance issues, so they both involved the manager. I hadn’t had the chance to ask him about the radiation, but at this point I was willing to bet he knew. He checked those reports every week; there was no way someone as particular to detail as Stanley would miss the duplication.

Wishing for the thousandth time I could have kept to the subject matter when talking to him earlier, I got up off the floor again and began making an inspection of all the cable connections. It was dumb as shit to do this barehanded, and still I went on ahead. Who would even care if I fried?

“You should be more careful.”

A shriek ripped from my throat. Jerking back, I stumbled and started to catch myself on the exposed wires. I knew, before my hand even hit, that would be a huge mistake. My fingers would slip through. They’d touch the circuits and—

Daddy’s hand closed around my wrist. He pulled me backward into his arms and steadied me on my feet. “Eliza!” He sounded shaken, glowering at the machine as though my mistake were its fault. Then his face softened, grew tired. He sighed softly and let me go, taking a step backward. “You could have hurt yourself,” he said softly, like an excuse for touching me.

I rubbed my wrist. “I didn’t.”

“No. I suppose you didn’t.” As though that were some kind of answer, Daddy nodded. Finally, he looked at me, his salt-and-chestnut eyebrows rising a little higher, causing his forehead to crinkle so much more than it used to. “Mrs. Beasley saw you come down here. I managed to talk her out of calling security.”

The mention of security jolted me right back to where I’d been before my father had ghosted into the room. Turning, I collected the screwdriver I’d dropped. That in hand, I lifted the paneling back into place on the purifier and began to re-fasten it. “Why bother? At least they’d have a good reason to get on my case this time.”

“Twice in one day is a bit much, even for you.”

My hackles rose; I couldn’t help it. Swinging round, I let the paneling drop as I raised both hands. “And that’s my fault? Or are you going to keep lying to me, too?”

“Eliza,” he began in that damned patronizing tone he liked to use when he decided I was being unreasonable.

“Don’t.”

Daddy shoved his hands into the pocket of his pristine, if aging, lab coat. He looked about as tired as Jonas and Stanley had. Maybe more. The bags under his eyes were dark, his chin scruffier than usual. Oh, he’d made some pass at being presentable—he was clearly showering and his hair was trimmed—but there was a weary slump to his shoulders that he normally wouldn’t let anyone see, not even when his insomnia had kept him up for a week.

“All right, sweetie,” he said, resigned to the fact that we were fighting whether or not he wanted to, “You still shouldn’t be down here. It isn’t your job any more.”

My short bark of laughter echoed off the walls, like the Vault itself was laughing with me. “And that means I shouldn’t care we’re all going to die. Right? It’s not my job, so I can’t worry about our impending doom. Go back to my office. Smile for the cameras. Eat my sugarbombs and shut my mouth.” I turned and picked the paneling back up, once again putting it into place.

I could have gone on, and would have. Daddy must have sensed that because he cut me off saying, “We are not all going to die. People are working on the issue already, I promise you that. I’m going to fix this.”

Stilling, I stared at the paneling for a long moment before slowly setting it back down once more. When I faced him again, Daddy was watching me with some expression I couldn’t identify. For the first time in a long while I felt small again, like I was still a little girl who could randomly hug him until he held me back. I felt like maybe I could do that again, just once more.

His eyebrows lifted a little, pleading maybe. “I’m going to fix this,” he repeated more softly, catching my gaze with his. “Please trust me, Eliza. Just this once.”

“I always trust you,” I whispered, afraid to break this strange spell between us. My feet itched to move forward. My arms ached to reach for him.

And then he laughed, a small sound that was kinder than it was cruel. All the same, it snapped that feeling and I fought to keep myself from recoiling. “So you’ll try to put it aside?” he pressed.

I frowned, looking back down at the screwdriver I was still holding. What was I even doing down here? Stanley had worked on this Vault longer than I’d been alive. He’d been over and over this room—he must have. What did I think I was going to find that he hadn’t already?

“Yeah.” Sighing, I shrugged and glanced back up at him. “I just…I just need to get this paneling back on.”

“All right, sweetie. Let me give you a hand.” He stepped forward to hold the paneling in place while I bolted it down. We worked in silence, and when we went to leave he slipped his arm over my shoulder in an unconscious echo of the way Jonas’ had earlier.

 


	3. Chapter 3

It's funny how life lines out sometimes. You can live vaguely aware of a problem for years without being motivated enough to question or fix it. And then, one day, by complete accident or coincidence, someone brings up a little detail that is so incongruous with the understood state of your world that absolutely everything seems to fall apart. 

This was my first experience having my life shatter so completely. Sadly, it wouldn't be the last. But at least that first time I was unaware enough of what would come that I managed to sleep. I slept so soundly, in fact, that I managed to miss the first and second morning bells. The silence in their wake was what jolted me out of bed, carrying me disheveled and jogging down the hall to the diner. 

NeNe was well established in a kitchenette when I arrived at the cafeteria. Most of the morning's dishes were already piled high in the sink, with only her skillet, spatula, and serving dishes left on the counter. I snagged the second apron from a peg at the rounded end of the counter and tossed the neck loop over my head. 

For all their reservations about space for living quarters, the Vault designers hadn't seemed to care when it came to the kitchen. Everyone shared common eating and prep times, but we were all expected to cook for ourselves. The Vault had one diner space that backed onto a kitchen prep area jammed tight with L-shaped, five-by-three kitchenette stations. Each kitchenette had its own counter space, range-and-oven combo, mixer, and sink. Dishes were stored in family-assigned lockers at the end of the room, but the kitchenettes themselves were on a strictly first-come, first-serve basis. No assignments, no sign up sheets, and no oversight. You could camp in one for hours if you had the supplies to justify it and the balls to look your neighbors in the eye after. 

Like so many things this was less a problem now than it had once been, according to NeNe. It was still time consuming and nonsensical. But somehow all efforts to pool resources and instead have an assigned, rotating kitchen duty had been rejected as "communist." Sometimes the Vault made me want to pull my hair out. 

"Sorry I'm late," I said, wincing at all the work she'd done by herself. Stir-fried potatoes mixed with tofu-bacon and bell peppers was sizzling in her trusty cast iron skillet, and through the oven's front window I could see a line of cornbread scones beginning to rise. I couldn't smell any of it--not in particular. All sixteen kitchenettes were occupied, and the mixed aromas of everyone else's breakfasts overpowered individual scents in a heady, hunger-inducing crush. "Why didn't you wake me?"

"A young lady needs her beauty sleep once in a while," NeNe pronounced, wagging her spatula at me for emphasis. She resumed stirring the potatoes. NeNe's potatoes were always properly crisped, never burnt. "I heard you had quite the day yesterday."

Annnd there it was. Of course Jonas had told her--I'd been horrible to him. Even with resentment still clawing at the back of my mind, sleep had tempered me, and added a certain amount of guilt to boot. I shouldn't have shouted. And I shouldn't have asked him...what I'd asked him. That, more than anything, was not something I'd wanted NeNe to hear. "He--I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have--"

"Oh, sweetie." Setting the skillet aside, she turned off the electric range and faced me. With a deep breathe, NeNe reached up to cup my cheeks between her soft, age-spotted hands. "None of that," she commanded in a gentle-but-firm tone that stopped my embarrassment in its tracks. "You didn't do anything wrong. I've been telling that father of yours for years he needed to explain things to you, but that man don't listen to anybody but himself anymore." 

"Explain....what, exactly?" It was way, way to early for more vagueries and double-talk. Glancing around, I found and eyed the coffee maker just next to the mixer. The karafe was still full--it was for the table after all--but all four of our mugs were lined up beside it. 

NeNe released my cheeks as she turned to follow my gaze, then laughed. "Alright, I can take a hint. Get yourself a mug and get started on those dishes."

"Yes, NeNe," I said dutifully, and skimmed around behind her to reach the interior corner. I flicked the warmer switch off before pouring myself a mug of coffee. It was thin and bitter, but the bite did more to wake me up than the rude jolt of realization I'd slept late had. I drained a quarter of the mug in a quick gulp, and pushed aside enough dirty dishes to slip the sink plug in place before twisting on the hot water. "What should Daddy have explained?"

There wasn't an immediate answer. I hadn't expected one. NeNe and Daddy were alike in that they never said anything more than they wanted to, and never before they'd had a good long think about it. I'd learned not to pester. If she decided not to talk I could resent her all I wanted; it wouldn't change anything. For some reason it was easier to accept this with NeNe than with Daddy or Jonas. Maybe it was that she'd never lied to me--not that I knew about, anyway. She either said something, or she didn't. I appreciated that.

The fight with Daddy and Jonas from the night before still had me rubbed raw. A part of me wasn't even sure I wanted her to answer. Lips pressed tight together, I set my mug aside. The water was a bit too hot, but I pretended not to mind as I mixed in the soap and grabbed the dishrag. 

And then NeNe said so softly I was barely sure I'd heard her, "Losing your mother damn near killed James."

That wasn't exactly new information. But, like so many things, it had never been said in such clear terms. It was that or he had never loved her at all...and I couldn't--wouldn't--believe that was true. The fact remained he never intentionally spoke of her. I had glimpses into the space she'd occupied--like occasional offhand comments about a preference of hers--but nothing so substantial as stories or pictures or old friends come to reminisce. 

I couldn't believe that lack of information was simple heartlessness. Still, I was glad to have it confirmed. If anyone knew the truth, it was NeNe.

"She was his light, his world; he hung on her every word like it came from God's own lips," NeNe continued, her voice barely audible over the kitchen chatter. 

I frowned. I'd never heard NeNe mention "God" like he was a real thing; not ever. But said like that, it was almost like she had believed once...or like Daddy had. Somehow that thought was disturbing, though I couldn't say precisely why.

But NeNe was still talking. "James lost his way when she died. Catherine had always been the one telling him what to do, you see; the one who made their plans, the one who had the vision. For years--so many years your father didn't know which way was up, much less what to do with you. But he tried. I know he tried. And he did what he thought was best. That's all anyone can do: their best."

Unable to help my self, I glanced back at her then. "Her name was Catherine?"

NeNe went still, one hand poised above the skillet handle. Her eyes, normally warm and gentle, had gone wide as she stared at me. "He didn't even--that man, I swear--" She cut herself off as the quiet sadness transformed into a bitter, contained rage. Shaking her head so hard her bobbing, white curls trembled long after the motion was complete, NeNe picked up where she'd left off with the food. She shoved the dishes around with more force than was strictly necessary.

"I told him," she muttered darkly, as she scraped the stir fry into a paper-lined basket. "One day you were going to have questions. He needed to put aside his grief and _talk to you_ like a normal human being. You're nineteen for Christ's sake. You ought to know what your own mother's name was. How come you never asked?"

The last question was barked as she rounded on me, one fist digging into her cocked hip. 

"I couldn't figure out how," I said, and shrugged sheepishly. The water was losing heat rapidly, and with a full-body jerk I reminded myself to keep washing the dishes before it got cold. Facing the dishes meant I couldn't see her half-accusing stare, and I was grateful for that. "I tried, a few times. But he always seemed so sad when I'd bring her up, and he never volunteered...It didn't seem right to ask anyone else."

NeNe's shoulders sagged. She touched my shoulder gently, bringing me to another pause. "Honey, let me give you a bit of advice."

It wasn't a question, but she waited to answer until I'd nodded and turned my chin slightly toward her. "Family is important. Being mindful of your family's needs is important, too. But sometimes family isn't going to be mindful of _you_. When they do that--when they keep doing that, over and over again?--that's when you need to put your foot down or find yourself some family who will."

I laughed weakly. "You don't _find_ family," I said automatically, though I knew that was wrong as soon as I'd said it.

NeNe snorted derisively. She plucked the empty skillet from the stove and slid it into the dishwater. "Your father found us, didn't he? Now finish with those dishes and help me haul this out to those loafers." 

I'd half expected NeNe to go off on Daddy as soon as she laid eyes on him. Instead, we deposited breakfast at our usual table in congenial silence. Daddy and Jonas were already there, bent over a collection of books and a clipboard they were both taking turns writing on. It looked a bit like being back in school, when the other kids would pass notes back and forth during lectures. 

"What are we working on, boys?" NeNe asked as she poured coffee for Jonas.

"Just a bit of a hypothetical," Jonas replied. "Thanks, NeNe."

He reached for his coffee and sipped it, grimacing a little but downing it all the same. Before either I or NeNe could press, Daddy took a scone from the pile and announced, "I might not be home until late tonight, Sweetie. Please don't stay up."

I frowned, pausing on serving myself some potatoes as I tried to make sense of this non sequitur. "Okay," I said, still puzzled after a minute of absolute mental blankness had passed. Why would I have stayed up? I never stayed up. I had my own duties to attend, after all, and if I bothered to stay up every time he had to work a late night I'd never sleep. 

"Were you planning to share those?" NeNe asked conversationally. She'd already loaded her own plate, except for the potatoes. I stared for a moment at the spoon, still held hostage in my hand, before quickly dumping the spoonful on my plate and passing the utensil over.

Daddy dimpled at me, apparently catching my nonplussed expression. "We're monitoring a few of the utilities for strange fluctuations down in the tunnels," he explained, "It's easier to just camp down there for the night."

"James, you can't be serious," NeNe snapped, frowning so deeply I could hear it in her voice. "There are radroaches in those tunnels."

"It's all right, NeNe," Jonas cut in. He speared a scone absently with a fork, not bothering to glance up from the clipboard. "We've done this plenty of times."

"You never told me about it."

"Or me," I added. 

Both the men looked up then, their eyes darting comically between the pair of us as they seemed to realize their mistake. Daddy coughed lightly into his mug as he finished a long sip of coffee. It was Jonas who started to speak, though, stumbling, "We didn't--that is, we knew you wouldn't.."

He trailed off, looking to Daddy for the proper lie. Instead, my father set down his fork and steepled his hands together. He leaned forward on his elbows. "I'm sorry, Lucy. We should have told you about the other times but we knew you'd be worried over Jonas' safety."

"You're always sorry, aren't you?" NeNe sighed. "Eat your breakfast before it gets cold. James, you're helping me with the dishes."

"Lucy--"

"That wasn't a request."

Daddy inclined his head toward her after a moment...and then it was like the conversation had never happened. He and Jonas continued their work, and NeNe asked me how my job was going, what that week's sermon would be covering, if Amata and I would be attending the Halloween dance. I answered distractedly, barely aware of what I was saying as I tried to figure out what just happened. 

The anger from yesterday was rapidly rekindling, feeding itself on the notion that everyone else at this table knew something I did not. More and more it seemed like there was a lynch pin in this, some little nugget of missing information that would make everything else fall into place. It was just as clear none of them--not even NeNe--were inclined to share it with me. 

And yet--and _yet_ what Daddy and Jonas had both said was true. I had known it was true, hadn't I? When Amata first came to me with the sensor issue, I'd told myself--I'd told her--that getting involved would be a mistake. I'd let my fear and my anger get the better of me. In the process I'd alienated Jonas, gotten into a wholly ridiculous and avoidable fight with Butch, nearly got caught in a secured zone without permission...and opened some doors on things I wasn't sure I wanted to know. Things I didn't think I would be able to forget, no matter how much I was beginning to wish I could. 

No sooner had Daddy and NeNe cleared the table did Jonas stand, taking the clipboard and book with him as he retreated from the uncomfortable atmosphere of our table. After a second's hesitation, I jumped up and trotted after him.

"Eliza," he sighed when I fell into step beside him, "Please don't--"

"I'm sorry," I cut in, raising both hands defensively.

Jonas cut me a sidelong look, wary and thoughtful. I shoved my hands into my pockets, and shrugged. "Not about all of it--I still don't get why you're lying to me and it's not OK--but I shouldn't have shouted, and, well, you were right. I should just mind my own business."

A sheepish smile tugged at Jonas' lips. He stopped and, before I could react, pulled me into a quick, tight hug. "I'm sorry, too," he said quietly into my hair--a gesture, I distantly noticed, that would probably keep any surveillance equipment from picking up on his words, "Things are going to get better. I promise. We'll talk about it more tomorrow, OK? After I get back." 

"OK," I agreed, trying to keep my puzzlement from showing. Jonas smiled again, and walked off toward the clinic. This time I didn't follow. 

Sometimes, when I look back on that last brief moment, I feel like he knew what was going to happen--even if he didn't want to admit it. Jonas knew those were the last words we'd ever say to each other.

The rest of that morning I threw myself into my work. Pretending something never happened was a child's game--it didn't work. That didn't mean I couldn't try. At the very least, I could follow my own advise and stop getting involved. Someone else was working on the problem. Someone else was going to fix it. 

It didn't matter how wrong it felt...right? 

So I cleaned, and swept my office for bugs, and listened to parishioners, and worked on my sermon. 

Once upon a time sermons were something priests read aloud to their congregations--impassioned speeches about morality and virtues as prescribed by their doctrine. I still recited them on Sundays when anybody bothered to show up. Most of the time they didn't. The few who did swore I was the best cure for insomnia ever invented. 

That probably should have been an insult, but I actually didn't mind. At least it was honest. I'd never been a great writer, and while I have no fear of speaking publicly I'm not Amata--I'm not motivated or passionate. Especially not about this subject matter. 

Most of the source texts were hard to follow to begin with, but I had trouble figuring out how tales of men sacrificing their children to appease a manipulative, game-playing deity had any bearing on our reality. Even with the excuse that these tales were metaphorical I had to stretch to apply them to real life. It wasn't that the morals weren't good--usually--but how do you apply lessons meant for a world where people had an entire planet to roam, to a world where we are jammed together tightly as canned sardines? 

The Vault had never practiced human sacrifice. We did not worship false idols or "correct" ones. We did not keep slaves, or have prostitutes, or nail people to crucifixes. There wasn't anything in the books about the morality of surveillance and breaches of privacy. I could--if I were braver--draw some parallels between over-bearing kings and the Overseer. Everything else was a stretch. 

Much as my position eased the minds of those who deigned to speak at me, I had to agree the more esoteric side of this job was just as unnecessary as the Overseer claimed. And none of that meant I didn't need to _do_ my job. If the Overseer wanted sermons, he would get sermons.

Otherwise...maybe I should give it up.

The thought wasn't a surprise, exactly, but my breath still caught as I wrapped my head around it. 

I'd felt guilty taking this position in the first place. In the beginning I'd been able to put that guilt aside, throwing myself into something new and exciting. It was thrilling having so many people talking to me, knowing so much about Vault gossip, and just having something to do that wasn't the same damned thing day in, day out. But that excitement had worn off over the past three years. Now it was a constant frustration going over records and stories I'd read a thousand times, writing up sermon after sermon of drivel, never seeming to do much of anything that mattered. 

But if I gave it up I would be throwing away Gloria's one solace, and Beatrice's coping mechanism, and Amata's place to rant. Sure the people I helped were few, but they should still matter. I had sworn to listen, to keep their secrets, to offer them comfort. 

And there was a way both could happen. There was a solution in the churning pit of anxiety that had replaced my stomach. I just didn't like it.

"Hey."

I startled, jumping backward in my chair and grabbing the arms as it bumped into the wall behind me. Amata, standing in the open doorway, cracked a small smile. She tapped the close button on the door as she stepped inside, absently locking the door as she said, "Either that's the most interesting blank paper in the world or you were taking quite the vacation. Go anywhere interesting?"

"Hawa'ii," I sighed, leaning back in my chair and fixing her with a grin that probably looked as forced as it felt. "Sunshine, swimming...you in one of those cute little pin-up outfits..."

Amata snorted rudely and circled around the desk. She perched herself on the corner, toeing my knee with her slipper-clad foot. "Like you know anything about sunshine, swimming, or what I look like in a swim suit." 

"I've seen you naked, it's close enough." Amata laughed and playfully swatted away the hand I'd begun to scrub up her calf. Her smile shaded into a concerned frown. Sometimes it was disturbing how quickly her good mood could disappear. "You looked upset." 

I scrubbed at my face with one hand, trying to figure out what to say. She saved me the trouble, prompting further, "Did you talk to Stanley?" 

"Yes. And no." At her up-ticked eyebrow I sighed and scooted down in my chair until the back of my head rested semi-comfortably against the headrest. One heel tapped a nervous beat against the floor. "I didn't get a chance to ask him about the reports. He told me about the purifier and I kind of freaked out."

I'd expected a nod. What I got was a blank, uneasy stare. Slowly, my heel-tapping ebbed until finally, in the silence, Amata asked warily, "What about the purifier?"

"You don't know?"

"Um, _no_. That's why I asked. What about the purifier?"

Everything that wasn't right about this situation began to press more firmly upon me; it had to be the most substantial insubstantial weight in existence. Amata was the Overseer's daughter, his assistant, and his--undeclared, sure, but understood--heir. She should have known about this. She should have been involved in whatever they were doing to fix it. 

And now I got to be the one telling her. Great. 

With no way out except a lie--and I refused to lie to her--I took a deep breath, stamped down the small but horrible satisfaction that came with not being the only person left in the dark for once--and said as gently as I could, "It's breaking down."

There was another long pause as what that meant seemed to visibly sink in. "Breaking down," Amata repeated in the bland, non-tone of shock or confusion. 

Definitely shock, I decided as she sat up straighter, her gaze transferring to the wall behind me. "You mean--no. No you wouldn't say it like that if it were just on the fritz again, would you?" Her laugh was humorless and sharp. "It's not fixable this time?"

I started to shake my head, thought better of it, and raised both hands instead in a placating gesture. "Something inside of it is breaking down. Maybe a single part, maybe more. Stanley said he's run out of the proper replacements."

"We can manufacture parts. There have to be schematics, or a old piece we could copy or--"

"It won't work." Amata gave me a sharp look and I shrugged helplessly. "Stanley said it wouldn't. He already tried. I'm not sure _why_ it won't, exactly...he got really defensive and wouldn't tell me anything after that." In point of fact, his excuses had made less sense than anything else in the last twenty-four hours. 

"He'll tell me," Amata spat, jumping to her feet. I stood with her, managing to catch her around the waist before she could get the door open. 

"Ama!" I picked her up, turning around with her in the same motion and released her behind me into the office. Amata whirred, glowering up at me as I blocked her path to the keypad and raised both hands. "Stop!" 

"What the hell?" 

"You can't go rushing out there jumping people for information!"

Amata scoffed. She leaned back, one hip cocked to the side, and crossed her arms. "And why not? I'm the Overseer's assistant. I should already know."

"Because I...already kind of did," I admitted. Before she could ask why that mattered, I jumped ahead, adding, "Amata, they'll know I was the one who told you."

She frowned, shaking her head at me. "So what? Is that what you care about? If the purifier is dying--"

"They're fixing it! My dad and Jonas and Stanley are fixing it. They promised." That sounded ridiculous, even to me. I closed my eyes. Deep breaths; I needed to take deep breaths. "Ama, please. I'm just as pissed off as you are--ask Jonas if you don't believe me--but storming off and showing our hand isn't the way." 

Amata stared up at me, her gaze unfathomable and expression tight. Finally, she asked in a quavering, controlled voice, "Then what is? You were supposed to talk to Stanley. You didn't. You talked to the others, and it got you...what? Promises with no explanation? And that's enough for you?"

"No." My throat tightened around the word, eyes beginning to sting with frustration. She was acting like this was all my fault--like I hadn't been trying to bully my way into the know since she started me down this path. A strange sort of resentment welled up then, even though I knew I was the one who'd volunteered. Amata would have run around here half cocked without my help, if I hadn't offered. Amata would have gone straight to her father and...

No. No. I couldn't have let that happen. Even if she didn't understand why. Even if I couldn't quite put a finger on why I knew that would only lead to bad things. The likelihood of the Overseer hurting Amata was...minimal. And yet every instinct I had said this was a live wire Amata was trying to repair bare handed. I just couldn't find the words to explain that.

Amata was saying something, and I didn't have the faintest idea what. Her words died as I blurted, "I'm going to quit."

"What?" It was enough of a non-sequitur she momentarily forgot to be pissed. "What are you talking about?"

I spread my hands, indicating the office. Amata took a step back, bumping into the wall behind her. "You can't be serious."

"I think I am," I said slowly, though I hadn't been fully sure before she'd come in. She continued to stare at me, non-plussed, for a full minute before perching again on the desk and waving an imperious hand at me to explain. So I did. 

The silence afterward was far more comfortable than it had been before, though there was still a weight of unsaid words lingering between us. Amata, her hands clenching the sides of the desk and frowning at the floor, finally said, "He'll go for it."

"Think so?"

"Yeah." She sighed and looked up, offering me the smallest smile. "I'll miss this place. But yeah. He'll go for it. And...you're right. It will put you in a better position to get information we both need."

"Thank you," I said, finally relaxing back against the door. The chime of dinner bells echoed through the hallway outside. I glanced at the time and sighed. "Come on. We'll be missed if we don't go."

Amata nodded. She slid off the desk, but paused to lean up on her tip-toes and give me a long, lingering kiss. Then I moved aside and let her precede me into the Chapel.

Dinner was a quiet affair. Daddy made salad; he wasn't much of a cook and we'd long since regulated his turn to the simpler evening meals. He and Jonas continued their quiet note taking and this time NeNe didn't bother making small talk with me. She stabbed her salad with a fierceness that belied the serenity of her expression. It was clear she still wasn't happy with the boys, and just as clear she wasn't going to press the issue. Fine. I could follow her lead.

As we finished, and Jonas was gathering up the dishes, I thought about bringing up what I was about to do. But no. They might try and talk me out of it, and then I'd waste time arguing, would miss the last of the Overseer's open office hours, and would be up all night worrying about getting up early enough to talk to him in the morning. So I handed my plate to Jonas, flashed him a smile, and muttered some excuse as I darted for the cafe door. The Overseer took his meals in his office most days--today had been no exception. I ignored the odd looks from security as I trotted through the atrium and mounted the steps leading toward the administration offices two at a time.

The long hallway at the top was composed of more window than wall; tall floor-to-ceiling glass panels allowed anyone walking past to see all the way through the security break room, lockup, and the antechamber that lead to the Overseer's private quarters which currently housed a bank of surveillance monitors, recording devices, and Amata's work desk. It was empty as I approached, and most of the security personelle were out on rounds or off duty. 

I made the mistake of congratulating myself on perfect timing just as the Almodovar's apartment door opened and the Overseer stormed out with Amata hot on his heels. 

I had to give her this: she wasn't shouting. She sounded calm and mostly reasonable. That didn't stop my heart jumping into my throat as I realized just what they were discussing. 

"--Does anyone know? You can't keep secrets like this!"

"Young lady, you are sorely out of line," the Overseer said, the barest thread of patience left in his oil-slick voice. "It is not your place--" 

"And it's _your_ place to lie to us? Oh, wait, you're the Overseer. That means you can do anything you want, right?" 

Part of me knew I should be getting far, far away from here. They hadn't turned yet--the Overseer was unlocking his office door and Amata was too focused on the conversation to pay attention to anything else--but I was standing dead-center in the hallway just outside the antechamber's open door. And my feet were frozen to the floor. 

We had just talked about this--I'd told Amata everything I was planning, and she...she...she hadn't agreed, I realized. I'd assumed she had, but she'd never said she'd go along with it, or that she'd wait. And now here she was doing exactly what I'd pleaded with her not to do before I'd even had a chance--

A throat cleared behind me as something cold and hard prodded the small of my back.

"Go on in," Security Chief Hannon said, voice casual but loud enough to be heard over the release of locks on the office door. The baton was a bit overkill, I thought, but didn't say a word as I complied. Amata and the Overseer both stopped dead, turning to look at us with far-too-similar expressions of annoyance and exasperation. 

"Should I lock the little spy up?" Hannon asked, seemingly not caring about the conversation he must have heard just as much of as I had. Either he'd been told, or he was really good at dismissing things he wasn't "supposed" to know. More likely both. 

Swallowing my bitterness, I scoffed indignantly and said, "I wasn't spying. I was standing. You can't blame me for the door being open." 

"You didn't announce yourself, either," Hannon drawled. His baton dug into my back, reminding me that he rarely needed an excuse to use it. 

"It's not my place to interrupt my betters," I replied carefully. That was putting it on a little thick, maybe. It was also the only thing I could think of that might mollify him. Before he could continue his questioning, I met the Overseer's eyes and explained, "I was coming to ask an audience, sir. I can come back if there's a better time...?"

The Overseer looked at me, then at Amata for a long enough moment he must have realized Amata knew I was planning to come up here and opened the conversation anyway. Perhaps even on purpose. Amata raised her chin and met his gaze in clear challenge. 

Finally, sounding tired the Overseer shook his head at Hannon. "It's alright, Henry. You can leave us, please." 

"Sir," Henry said with enough hesitation it might have been a protest if he hadn't re-holstered his baton and marched out of the office, down the hall to the security break room. As soon as he was gone the Overseer turned to Amata. 

"Go to your room."

"What?"

"You heard me," the Overseer snapped over her continued protests, his voice cracking like a whip and silencing her immediately. Much more calmly, but no less sharply, the Overseer continued, "You are my second and will likely take this office one day, but you are not the Overseer yet. Until I cede the title to you, or until I die, I am the sole authority here--whether or not you like it. If you do not wish to be locked in there for the rest of the _month_ , you will do as I say. We will continue this discussion later. In private."

Amata's mouth worked, the starts of several protests dying before they reached her lips. Then her jaw snapped shut with an audible click. Without a single glance in my direction she turned and stalked to the apartment. The door shut behind her. 

Then it was just me and the Overseer. He sighed at the apartment door, shook his head, and turned for his office. "Come with me."

I spared my own look at the apartment door as I followed him into the wide expanse of his office. What had just happened wasn't my fault, but I couldn't help feeling somehow guilty. Maybe I should have listened better, or stayed more on task with Stanley. Maybe I should have tried to press why I hadn't wanted her to talk to her dad; the words may not have been there, but I hadn't even tried to find them. 

The Overseer reached his desk as I cleared the doorway. A second later the door swooshed shut. 

One of the larger rooms in the Vault, the Overseer's Office was round, with a rounded desk in the precise center adjacent to a large, round window overlooking the atrium beneath. Thanks to some trick in the curvature of the glass, you could see the atrium easily from the desk's center. From the atrium you couldn't see into the office unless the observer were standing directly against the window's glass. Given that said observer would need to be either sixteen feet tall or floating that didn't seem likely.

"So," began the Overseer as he poured himself a glass of scotch, "What exactly can I do for _you_ , Eliza?"

The inflection he placed on you made it clear he saw this as an annoyance, at best. I had hoped to find him good spirits at the end of his day, or at least so tired he'd just agree to get me out of his hair. That wasn't going to happen now, and while I was capable of saying "Sorry you had a fight with your daughter. I'll come back when you aren't so pissy"...it didn't seem advisable. 

Instead, I took a deep breath and tried to recall the speech I'd been silently rehearsing all through dinner. "You were right," I said, trying not to let on how the words were trying to stick in my throat. "I should have listened to you when you said my position was antiquated, and that maintenance needed me more. I was a foolish child, and I've come to--"

The Overseer was laughing. Sure, he wasn't laughing out loud, but the grin stretched across his face and the way his shoulders were jumping telegraphed his amusement just as baldly. Shaking his head, the Overseer saluted me with his glass and took a long drink before his smile wilted and died. "You want your old job back."

It hadn't really been a question; a fact he proved when he continued a moment later, "I tried to tell you, your father, Brotch...Amata..but I am just the Overseer, aren't I? I couldn't possibly have any idea what is best for this Vault."

"I didn't mean--"

"No, you didn't." He set the glass down with a sharp clink and frowned at me. "You hardly ever do. So. Tell me why I should take your at your word now. Have you thought through this request, or are you simply reacting to something? Something more than me being mysteriously proven 'right?'"

I froze. My plan had been to appeal to his egotism and arrogance, assuming that if I debased myself enough he'd accept it without question. Even Amata had thought it would work. We had both clearly underestimated him. 

Slowly, brain struggling to reorient to this new reality, I opened my mouth and hesitated again. There was only one other option that I could see, but taking it would mean admitting Stanley had told me things he shouldn't have, and telling him what Amata had found. The latter might have happened already, given the argument I'd walked in on. Still, I couldn't be sure it had, and it felt like a betrayal to even consider it. 

The Overseer settled slowly into his office chair, tipping back into it as he watched me. Finally, when I'd been silent too long, he sniffed and gestured to the chair across his desk. "Have a seat, Eliza," he commanded wearily. I did as I was told, clasping my hands together on my knees as I watched up. 

"Sir--"

"What exactly do you believe you can accomplish in maintenance?"

I took a deep breath. "Stanley is overworked--"

"He was overworked when you left maintenance. That has not changed."

"No," I agreed, struggling to maintain a tone of deference and respect. Fear of the man and what he could do was beginning to war with my temper; never good. "It hasn't. But it's been getting worse."

When the Overseer didn't say anything to that, I continued, "I'm not the best--I won't claim to be--but I'm a hard worker, and I put my all into what I do. No one is coming to the sermons like I thought they would, and more and more I feel like that's a waste of time and resources. Surely it would be better for everyone involved if I admitted it and spent my time more wisely serving the Vault's interests."

"I see," said the Overseer. "So you've been stealing from the Vault?"

My blood ran cold. Oh, he was a slick bastard. Though I hadn't seen the way my words could be twisted--until he'd doneit--I had no trouble at all believing others would see it that way. "No! No, that isn't what I meant." I held my hands up, placating. "I'm still helping plenty of people, like Beatrice, and I'd like to continue helping them. On my own time, after hours."

That actually seemed to surprise the Overseer. Both his eyebrows lifted as he straightened in his seat. "And how do you propose to do that?"

Lowering my hands again, I took a breath and continued, "The private sessions really do seem to be helping, like Da--Dr. Vakhrushev--initially speculated. But I could easily re-arrange my regular appointments to evenings and spend the day hours with the maintenance crews."

"That would mean giving up your free time," the Overseer said slowly, as though he didn't think I'd quite thought this through.

"I know. But I made a commitment to them. I intend to keep it, if you'll allow me."

The Overseer's eyes narrowed speculatively. He was probably wondering what my "game" was. Part of me hated him for that, constantly expecting I was up to something, and part of me understood. I questioned everyone's motives all the time. 

Then something completely unexpected happened: he smiled. 

As though that weren't weird enough, for the briefest moment I thought I saw glimmer of respect in his eyes. 

"All right," the Overseer said. "I'll inform Stanley to expect you in the morning. If he has work for you, you will complete it promptly. If not, you will report to your duties in the chapel as before. You will not be getting a pay increase for double duty."

I'd expected that, so I nodded and thanked him, preparing to get up and retreat. 

"I'm not finished." For the third time since I'd come up the stairs, I froze. My sudden burst of fear must have shown; the Overseer's smile shifted to self-satisfied smirk as he sat up straighter and steepled his fingers together, elbows on the desk. "I cannot just let this oversight slide. You have, after all, wasted a considerable portion of the Vault's time these past three years. By your own admission, even."

"Sir--"

"Stop," the Overseer commanded, with one hand raised in the universal gesture of the same. "Do not try to bargain with me or back-track, young lady. In Vault 101 we accept the consequences of our failures. I failed in this, just as much as you; I allowed you to have your way even when I knew what you were requesting was the to detriment of the Vault. Am I to assume you are somehow right, now, even as your request breaks all procedure and regulations? Do you believe yourself so special?"

There was an awkward silence as I tried to figure out if the question was rhetorical this time. 

"Well?" He prompted, finally.

"No, sir," I said, slowly, half expecting to be interrupted again. "But I thought I was giving up my free time--"

"Do have enough appointments to fill that free time?" 

My heart sank as I realized what he was getting at; what I had walked right into. Still, I saw little choice but to answer. "Not entirely, but that would only be a few free hours a week at most--"

"And you have quite a bit to make up to the community for," the Overseer jumped in again, with a sad nod. "So, I am going to dock your pay for every free hour you do not spend on counselling appointments, until you have repaid the Vault for every hour misappropriated in the Chapel.

I stared at him. 

I'd known this conversation was going to cost me, but I'd thought willingly giving up a large chunk of my time normally spent with Amata would be enough to mollify him. This...this wasn't _cruel_ \--I still would get ration chits for basic supplies--but it was mean. Pointlessly, unfairly mean. 

Trying desperately to fight back the tears of humiliation and anger, I forced myself to nod and rise from my seat. "Yes, Overseer," I managed to say with some semblance of respect. He sat back and nodded imperiously at me and hit the remote button for the office door. The sound of it opening was all the invitation I needed to flee. 

 

The Atrium was still packed as I passed through; people played pong and read books and sat in circles, chatting about their days. I squeezed expertly through the throngs and out into halls that were only a little less packed. Children--few and far between these days--were chasing each other in endless games of tag, while security officers yelled after them to "knock it off" without actually doing anything about it. 

No one seemed to notice me--thank god--as I slipped down the nearest stairwell, heading for our apartment. I didn't want anyone to see the shine in my eyes, or the tremble in my fingers. 

Indignant, unholy rage clawed like acid up the back of my throat. What was his problem, anyway? Why? What in the nine Hells had I done to that man? 

The idea that it wasn't personal had gone out the window with Jonas' little slip and now...now I felt sure that something was horribly wrong here, and the fact that no one would tell me what it was was such utter, complete bullshit.

I made it to the apartment in record time to find the door open and soft music playing within. I stepped inside and slammed my hand down on the door release, unconsciously echoing Amata from the day before. 

Daddy was standing at the small living-room table, a ragged camouflage backpack I'd never seen before set on the table and a few items waiting to be packed spread out before him. He looked up in confusion as I stormed across the room, yanked the EMP device out of his pocket and clicked it on. 

"Why. Do. They. Hate. Us," I demanded, carefully annunciation each word so it came out as a sentence unto itself. 

"Eliza," Daddy said carefully. He reached for the pen and I danced out of the way, hiding it behind me. 

"Nu-uh," I told him, with a shake of my head. "I am done being the good little girl, letting you lie to me and say weird vague shit and never telling me anything. _Why_ , Dad?"

As if I hadn't been humiliated enough already, my voice cracked with a uncontrollable sob when I asked, "What did I _do_?"

"Oh, honey," Daddy sighed softly. He sank slowly into the chair next to him. There was a long moment of tense, angry silence where I thought he wouldn't answer me. Instead, he stared at his hands, pressing his lips into a hard, thin line, and finally sighed. "It isn't anything you did. It was me."

"You?" I snorted indignantly. That was ridiculous...wasn't it? I racked my brain, trying to remember if anyone treated him the same way they did me. I wasn't sure I believed they did.

"Please sit down," Daddy prompted, gesturing to the chair across from him. When I crossed my arms instead he sighed, but he said anyway, "I'm sure you've heard about the plague?"

"The one that killed Amata's mom?"

"And half the Vault," Daddy confirmed. 

For a moment I just stared at him, uncomprehending. I didn't _want_ to comprehend this. Even though, as a small-voiced thought ventured from the back of my mind, it made perfect, horrible sense.

Daddy seemed to realize this was going to take time to process; he sat there, waiting patiently, as my eyes widened and I reached a trembling hand for the back of the nearest chair. 

I sank into it before I could do anything so ridiculous as fall over. "You--you're not a virologist. You couldn't have--."

"Not in the way you might be thinking." Daddy pursed his lips. "I didn't create it--no one did. God, maybe, but that's a debate for another day. No...it was a disease old as human life itself, but one the Vault population hadn't had to deal with in generations."

"Then how..." Shaking my head, I stopped the silly question. I knew how. There were a thousand cracks and crannies surrounding the Vault, fissures in our sheltering earth that let in radroaches and skeevers and other mutated pests who could probably still harbor disease. All it would take was an encounter with the wrong one to pass something on. 

"Children are fairly resilient to the disease, though they catch and spread it. You, Jonas, Amata...you all bounced back fairly quickly. Once you have have it, and recover, you are effectively immune in adulthood. But for an adult to catch it, who doesn't have that childhood immunity in place, well...We are lucky anyone survived."

I shook my head. "But why blame you? Did you catch it first?"

"No." Daddy sucked in a deep breath. "I was the only doctor they had, and there were no vaccines or miracle cures like stimpaks to rely on. Stimpaks are wonderful, but they can't stop a virus. No...They tolerate my presence because despite my failures they still need me. But none of them have forgotten that when they needed me most, I failed them."

Part of me didn't want to ask the next logical question. I asked anyway, the long-burning need to know obscuring any sense of propriety.

"Is that what happened to Mom?"

The sudden widening of his eyes was the only indication of alarm I got before Daddy schooled his expression. He pursed his lips again, then closed his eyes and nodded silently. 

Before I could apologize or think too much better of pressing him further, Daddy said, his voice thick and tinged with longing, "You would have liked her, you know. She loved you...more than life itself."

A revelation like that probably should have made me sad. I wondered, briefly, what it said of me that all I felt was a rush of hope. As though the love of a long-dead woman could change anything. A thousand questions rushed into my head, so loud and garbled I couldn't grasp on any one. My mouth worked in a vain attempt, "Did she--was--how did--"

Daddy held his hands up in a warding gesture, but he was laughing quietly as he said, "I know you have questions. And I'm so sorry. Lucy was right, I should not have kept this from you so long." 

He did look genuinely regretful as the amusement slipped from his face. "And I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to wait a little longer."

"What?"

He glanced at the clock, giving me a fake smile as he stood. "I have to meet Jonas. We don't want him getting antsy and trying to go off in the tunnels by himself."

"I've done it." 

"You are a crack shot with that BB gun of yours." Daddy hurriedly began to put the last few items away in his pack, and closed it up. "Jonas is good enough but hasn't a violent molecule in his body."

"Unlike me," I teased.

"I didn't say that." Daddy looked momentarily horrified before he realized I was joking. "Ah. Yes, well..."

Leaning forward, Daddy pressed a kiss to my temple. I went still, not sure what to do with that. Either he didn't realize how odd it was for him to show affection like that, or he just didn't care. "I love you, Sweetie."

"O--Okay...?" I answered, too stunned to come up with anything better as he shouldered his bag and stepped around me toward the door. Daddy paused in the open doorway, glancing back at me. I waved, offering an awkward smile...and then he was gone. 

By the time I realized I still had his EMP device in hand, it was too late to catch up to him. After a moment's consideration I clicked it off and hid it in my front pocket. Tomorrow was going to be a heinously long day. I needed to rest, and figure out how I was going to explain this to my family. 

I fell asleep to the thought of apologies and maintenance reports. I woke, some short time later, to blaring sirens and Amata weeping.


	4. Chapter 4

Dizzy with interrupted sleep, it took a few seconds for me to de-tangle reality from the threads of a dream. Then I saw the tears cascading down Amata's cheeks. Reality slammed home as she shook me again--she'd been doing that for a few minutes, I realized--and pleaded, "Eliza, wake! Up! You have to get up, baby, _please_."

That, more than anything else, was what got me to sit up straight and try to process what I was seeing. "What's going on? Radroaches?"

"No--yes--no," Amata wavered. She shook her head, stepping back enough that I could get up. I didn't get up. Instead, I stared as she wrapped her arms defensively around herself. Though her tears had slowed noticeably, she was still crying and didn't seem to care. "You mean you didn't _know_?"

Her demand raised the hair on the back of my neck, chasing away any lingering illusion of sleep. "Know what? Ama, if it's radroaches we've done this--oh god, did someone die? Is...is someone--"

Daddy and Jonas were in the tunnels. The tunnels, where radroaches sometimes nested. Daddy was a fighter. Jonas wasn't. If they'd been overwhelmed...

Amata put a hand over her mouth, sniffling, as she stared at me. She nodded, quick and precise. "Jonas. They killed him." 

I heard what she said. Nothing about it seemed to make sense. I mean, it _did;_ the words strung together in a logical order to a logical meaning. But...but he couldn't--it wasn't _possible._ I gave up trying, allowing the odd, nonsensical feeling to stay. It was like someone had drawn a blanket down between me and reality; like the tingly feeling you would get when a limb fell sleep. 

"And Daddy?" I asked, not really wanting the answer.

"So you _did_ know," Amata spat. She scrubbed the tears away with the back of her hand, shaking her head indignantly. "I can't believe you! You let them do this--you didn't _tell_ me?"

"I--what?" And the train of nonsense just kept going. This time there wasn't even a meaning I didn't care to grasp. For a moment I struggled to puzzle it out, realized that would take a while, and instead explained: "I _told_ you they were fixing the purifier. They went into the maintenance tunnels to fix...the...purifier...?"

Amata was shaking her head. Yet she looked relieved beneath the horror. Lunging forward, she grasped both my hands and tugged me to my feet. "You have to get out of here."

"Hold on," I snapped, sudden anger lancing through the weird shell of non-reality. This was ridiculous. I broke her hold on my wrists and fell back down onto bed, demanding, "What the shit is going on?"

"I told you, they killed Jonas." I winced away from her words, but Amata didn't seem to care. She gestured to the window behind herself, overlooking the emergency-lit hall beyond. "Who do you think they're coming for next?"

"The radroaches have a _plan?_ "

"What?"

And there it was. Our eyes met as we both realized we weren't talking about the same thing--and neither of us had said _enough_ for the other to piece it together. Unfortunately, the confusion wasn't broken with answers, but with the stomping booted of feet further down the hall. Amata went pale, flew to the window, and then looked back at me with wide, terrified eyes. "They're coming. Please, we have to _go_."

This time I didn't hesitate. I still didn't understand what was going on, but somehow understanding mattered less than the spike of instinctual alarm and the look in Amata's eyes. I flew to my feet, grabbed her hand, and together we ran from the apartment.

Most of the time I hated that the Vault was built like a labyrinth. Not now. The Vault's labyrinthine nature may have been the only thing that saved our lives.

We took a left out the apartment door and managed to reach the women's restrooms before any of the guards rounded the hall corner. A second, opposing entrance to the restrooms gave us a clear escape route down the next hall over. At the end, we ducked into a storage closet that I knew hid a small maintenance shaft exiting onto an empty classroom. 

The classroom had the faint odor of disuse and dust many of the abandoned rooms had; no one had been in here for years. 

Amata pulled me down behind the teacher's large, bolted-down desk, out of view from the windows cut into the front and side walls of the room. They were so caked in grime and neglect I doubted anyone could have seen us anyway, but having the desk there made me feel a little more secure. 

"What _exactly_ did your dad say?" Amata asked, once she'd caught her breath. In the gloom I couldn't read her expression, but she sounded way less pissed than she had before. There was still a lingering note of accusation that I didn't like, but that could be dealt with later.

Though questions of my own were nagging to be asked, I took a deep breath and tried to remember. What _had_ they said? "They..." I frowned. Slowly, carefully, I admitted, "Actually, they didn't say they were fixing the purifier--I mean, Daddy did _say_ they were working on it, but that was two days ago, before we talked last. He didn't give me details."

"But you knew they were leaving?"

"No," I said automatically, and winced. "Yes. Sort of. They said they had some tests to run in the maintenance tunnels that would take a while. They were going to stay there tonight and be back in the morning."

"And you assumed it was about the purifier," Amata finished for me. 

"Yeah." When she didn't immediately say anything else, I jumped on the silence, "What _happened_ , Ama? Where's--why is Jonas--" 

I couldn't bring myself to say it. Saying it would be the same thing as accepting it, and I just couldn't do that. Amata had to be wrong. She'd had a nightmare or a shock of some kind, but she hadn't seen Jonas _die_. She couldn't have. The conjoining fact that men were chasing us was just...coincidental? Even my denial was having a hard time with that, but I tamped it down and clung with both hands to the notion that this was all a misunderstanding. It was the only thing I could do to fight the panic clawing it's way up my throat. 

Amata shook her head. "I didn't catch all of it. I was asleep when they drug him in. The shouting--it woke me up." She spared a look over her shoulder at the wall, like someone might come through it to attack her. She swallowed before continuing. "They went through the maintenance tunnels, all right. They cut through one of the walls and into the gatehouse. They opened the Vault."

My throat locked up. For a pure,panicking second I couldn't talk, or breathe, or _think_. It was impossible. It was just, straight-up impossible. No one was dumb enough to open the door--especially not Daddy or Jonas. For fuck's sake, they were the Vault doctors! They _knew_ what radiation exposure would do.

But the sirens...Amata's terror...security coming for me...

Amata grabbed my arm. A second later I heard it: the scrape of boots, voices growing loud. Someone--no, some _people_ were coming down the hall outside. 

I was almost grateful. The overwhelming panic of something I couldn't possibly fight was replaced in the face of a situation I could confront. I might not be on equal footing with Security--they were all trained and armed, after all--but they were physical. They were a known terror. And, if it came down to it, they were something I could hit. 

Hopefully it wouldn't come to that.

"There's no way she got down here," Officer Mack snapped. Their voices were just outside the window to our left. Amata and I were still as rocks as we listened to the scuff of boots on metal. "We had men on all the stairwells."

"So where do you think she went, then? You heard the Chief. We look everywhere--she can't have disappeared." That was Officer Kendall; he wasn't one of the worst, but he wasn't a friend either. 

I glanced back at the wall we'd come through, the trap door still in place. We might be able to get back through quickly enough they wouldn't notice the change in light through the grimy windows. ...and then what? We'd be back on the same hall the others might still be searching. Surely they'd left someone to watch the apartment, knowing I might try to return and lay low where they'd already searched. There wasn't another way out of there except--

"I bet the old lady could tell us."

I froze. Already half-poised to reopen the tunnel, I turned slowly to face the still-closed door. Amata shouldn't have been able to see the expression on my face, which had to be murderous--I certainly felt murderous--but she must have picked up on something else, because suddenly she was between me and the door and had a hand on my shoulder. "Eliza," she cautioned, even as the conversation continued behind her.

"You heard Hannon. No one touches Lucy. Not yet," said Kendall. He sounded like they were discussing what to have for lunch. "She's a dumb old bat with terrible judgement. Doesn't make her a traitor."

"She just treats traitors like they're family, that's all," Mack sneered. It was phrased like a question, though it was clearly an accusation. "Her whole goddamn family died, and she _still_ didn't wise up. Come off it, Kendall. She ain't any better than her fuck-wit grandson."

Amata's finger's tightened on my shoulder, then released. She shifted just enough that I thought I caught a scowl on her lips as she, too, turned toward the conversation. 

A door opened in the hall--right across from the classroom. The sound of cabinets opening and furniture moving began a minute later. "Lucy's still one of us," Kendall was saying. "So was Jonas. And maybe he deserved it, given what he did--"

Maybe I heard the rest of what he said. Maybe it's locked somewhere deep down inside of me, some small part of me that still remembers, clearly, what happened that night. All I recall is the fear and the rage, and stepping into the hall to find the adjacent door open and the guards with their backs to us. 

I remember thinking I'd have to thank Butch; he taught me how to choke someone until they passed out. I remember Amata standing between me and Kendall, as though I didn't already have a human shield in the limp form of Officer Mack. 

And I remember the radroaches.

One moment Kendall had his gun out, debating whether he could shoot me through Mack and Amata, and the next a swarm of brown, dog-sized bodies was pouring out of a loose vent in the back of the room. "Kendall--behind you!"

"Shut the fuck up," Kendall roared at me, not bothering to pay attention to what I was saying. The roaches were on him in a second. 

A single radroach isn't much of a problem. Their bites hurt, sure, and they have a degree of radiation to them, but unless you're allergic a single bite can't do much damage. But five bites? Ten? Thirty? Radroach swarms can kill. 

Kendall screamed. He shot and kicked at the swarm, missing more than he hit. I had enough time to realize the armored suit he was wearing was protecting him from most of the damage before Amata's tugging at my arm registered. 

"We have to go!"

"But Kendall--"

"There's too many!" She was frantic--and Mack was still weighing me down. I looked at Kendall one last time before nodding and dragging Mack backward. He was heavy, and Amata grabbed his arm to help me the second she realized what was I was doing. When his shoes cleared the doorway she slammed her fist down on the lock just as the Kendall screamed again. 

One of the roaches turned, saw us leaving. It was fast enough to get stuck in the bottom of the door, legs splayed and scrabbling on the metal. I dropped Mack in a heap, body half inside the school room, before jumping back over him into the hall. "Are you hurt?"

Amata was staring at the roach, the back of one wrist pressed to her lips. We could still hear Kendall inside, swearing. Either he was out of bullets or he'd realized how useless that method was.

"Ama!" She gaze snapped to me when I grabbed her shoulders. 

Shaking herself once, Amata nodded. She looked away, gaze roaming around the hall as she said, "Yeah...yes I'm fine. We should go. They're going to know something's up." Her gaze landed on Mack's prone form and I followed it. He was still breathing, thank god. That much was obvious. 

Amata bent and pulled the gun out of his holster. She brandished it at me, grip first. "I think you're going to need this."

I wanted to say no. This was all a misunderstanding, my mind screamed. Jonas wasn't dead. Kendall wouldn't have shot me, even if he'd had the chance. They had not been talking about hurting my grandmother. 

Hands trembling, I took the gun. Amata smiled, strange and sad. "Get to the Overseer's office--"

"What? Ama--"

"There's an escape tunnel there," she said, raising both hands to ward off my questions. At my dubious look she sighed. "I'll explain later if we have time, but--it's your only chance. They sealed the maintenance tunnels after what--after they--to try and stop the radroaches." 

With a pained look at the door next to us and the horrible, wretched scrabbling of the creature trapped beneath it, Amata added, "Clearly didn't work but they tried. Get to the office. Find the door beneath the desk. I'm going to check on Lucy, then I'll try and buy you some time."

"We should both go."

"No," Amata shouted. She winced, listening to the way her voice carried, and repeated more calmly, "No. We don't have time. You have to get out of here. I don't know why they haven't checked the security tapes yet, but they're going to and they'll see us. If we're not together...maybe we have a chance."

That sounded wrong. I didn't know why it sounded wrong, but it did. Before I had time to think about it, Amata leaned up, grasped my face in both hands, and kissed me. 

It wasn't our best kiss--it was quick and frantic and tasted like tears--but it was steadying. We lingered only a moment, connected by our lips and the warmth of her hands on my cheeks...and then she was running down the hall toward the stairs.

Mack moaned. It was a small sound, no where close to wakefulness, but it was enough. 

How did I get to the Overseer's office from here? It was on the other side of the Vault, up a stairwell connected to nothing else. Nothing except security...and inaccessible factory levels....

Factory levels. There weren't any cameras in the factory levels. There weren't normal access panels either, only ones the upper echelons of the maintenance personnel had access to. Stanley had taken me there once, right before the G.O.A.T. Back when he thought I would be maintenance for life.

I cast one more look at the door beside me. Kendall had gone silent; far too silent. Before I could think any more about that, before I could lose nerve and wait for Mack to wake up and shoot me, I started running. 

Using the stairwells seemed fool-hearty, given what we'd overheard. Amata didn't know any other means for accessing the various sections of the Vault. I did. A few halls later I found another small maintenance closet. This one was hardly bigger than a locker on the outset, and stuffed with mops and brooms. I kicked the supplies into the hallway, not caring who heard. If the guards had spent any time in maintenance they might know about this place...but they might not. Many of the kids who rotated into maintenance never learned more beyond fetching tools and the more convenient hiding places. And I had little choice but to risk it. 

Once the back wall was clear I shoved my fingers into a tiny, almost invisible indentation and pulled. The paneling swung outward, revealing a larger crevice stretching deep and dark backward into the vault. 

A shout from the halls I'd just fled jerked my attention away for a precious second. Then, without any consideration for the blackness of the crawl space I squeezed myself inside and jerked the door shut behind me. 

It was different than it used to be; the tunnel seemed smaller and more filled with loose wires and cobwebs than it ever had when I was a kid. _Things_ crawled over my skin as I shuffled awkwardly through the Vault's internal organs, praying I didn't jostle anything terribly sensitive. Sometimes there were exposed circuits, places where the cover had been lost or broken over the years. 

As though the mere act of thinking about them had conjured one, I felt the distinct texture of of a circuit board beneath my fingertips right before my palm sliced against something sharp. Hissing, I jerked my hand away and stuffed the wound against my mouth. 

The smell, the _taste_ of blood flooded my senses. It couldn't have been that much, but it for a moment the pain grounded me, driving away the vestige of anxiety that had begun to chip away my protective layer of shock. 

"Move," I muttered at myself as I took my hand out of my mouth. Nodding to no one, I continued on, reaching out a hand in front of me more carefully than I had before. It seemed to take forever but finally-- _finally_ \--they brushed the smooth back panel.

Voices behind me. My eyes widened, but the space was too small to turn my head back and look at the way I'd come. 

"What the," someone asked, voice muffled by the wall and the clattering of objects as he kicked through the mess I'd left behind. "Did she do this? Why?"

Someone else swore. "She's in the walls."

"What?"

"The walls, man! Did you bother reading the schematics? Find the hatch!"

Fingers scrabbled for the access panel. All the anxiety I'd been feeling began to bubble up again, rising like vomit in the back of my throat. No, no, no. No. I can't give in to that--this isn't the goddamn _time_ , Eliza. I need to think. I need to be steady.

Raising my hand to my mouth again, I tried to find the cut with my tongue and failed. And then I bit. I bit _hard_. Once again blood filled my mouth, followed by blessed, centering pain. I moved. 

I shoved the closer panel open with my shoulder just as the one behind me flooded the tunnel with light. "Hey!" Someone shouted, but it was too late. I was through. 

I slammed the panel closed over their screaming for me to halt, to stop, to just come back before this got any "worse" for myself. There was a shelf next to the door. I grabbed it with my free, blood-stained hand and pulled. It wasn't a very good shelf--or maybe it was a _great_ shelf. It came loose without much protest, the boxes and chemicals stored there spilling out to make a passable barrier against the access panel--even if any of the guards were slim enough to make it through there, they couldn't now.

This end of the access was larger, though not by much. It was a closet filled with chemicals and medkits and microscopes; science wing. Specifically, Daddy's clinic. There wasn't a direct access between here and the school rooms. The guards would have to go up through the atrium and down another stairwell, giving me a few minutes. 

I slipped through the door into Daddy and Jonas' office. 

It was thoroughly trashed, papers and desk drawers tossed everywhere; a computer left a useless, sparking pile on the floor. Without pausing to examine anything, I shuffled through as quickly as I could into the main clinic. A man was silhouetted against the hall light. 

Officer Gomez stared at me, and I at him. His hand rested lightly atop the gun on his hip--not a baton, a _gun_ , just like Mack had been wearing. Just like the one I held. He scowled, deeper and more serious than I'd ever seen directed at me, and somehow that seemed to highlight the brown smear across the front of his vaultsuit that I didn't want to think about. 

"Please," I whispered into the sudden, complete silence. "Is NeNe OK?"

His eyes trained down to the gun still weighing down my hand. "If I say no?"

The implication hit like a blow. I swayed, taking a step back, and wrapped my other hand around the gun's grip. I'd never fired a pistol before, but I knew the basics. The harder part was going to be firing at a person. "I don't want to hurt any body," I said, though I already had, "But I can't let them hurt her. Please."

Gomez's eyes closed, his lips mouthing a few swear words. That wasn't the answer he'd wanted. Still, he hadn't threatened me. Not exactly. "Do not point that gun at me," Gomez warned, a finger raised. He glanced back over his shoulder at the hall. "Lucy is fine. You need to worry about yourself. Where are you going?"

It's all well and good to say she was fine. That wasn't proof. Amata might have told me to get out, but that...it just wasn't good enough. I needed to know. I needed to see her.

I shook my head, resisting the urge to raise the gun. "Where is she?"

"No where you can get to." 

"Where?" I snapped, the gun raising half an inch. We both flinched at the way my voice carried in the silent halls. Gomez eyed my weapon again. 

"Lizzy Girl, I know you're scared, but you really best not threaten me," he warned a second time, a shade in his tone implying there'd be no third warning. What would he do if I did? My fingers trembled with a sudden, wild urge to find out--to know precisely how far I could trust him. But that would be breaking his trust in me, wouldn't it? Trust that was, by all appearances, already strained.

Too bad I couldn't let this go. 

"I'm not threatening you," I said as calmly as I could manage. "I just need to know she's OK. She's my family, Gomez. She's--she's my only family le--left--"

Tears, burning and hot, flooded my eyes. I squeezed them shut, willing them away even as they dripped down my cheeks. No, no, no. I took a hand off the pistol and hastily wiped them clear again, blinking to bring Gomez back into focus. "I have to."

When Gomez came back into focus, the half-angry tension was gone. He looked ancient and tired, and...scared. Just as scared as I was, maybe. And then I just felt guilty. Here he was, trying his best in an awful situation, and I'd wanted to threaten him. Maybe even shoot him. 

He shook his head. "You have to get out of here," he repeated.

"What is it with you people?" I hissed, "I can't leave her alone in...in whatever this is. And where the hell am I supposed to go, exactly? The outside? That's fucking--"

"Follow your father," Gomez snapped, the anger returning as quickly as it'd gone. "You want to help Lucy, that is how you do it. Find James. He got us all into this mess, and he can fucking well fix it. Drag him back here if you have to. You're the only one who can."

The vehement aura radiating off him was enough to push me back a step as Gomez punched something into his pip-boy. He huffed, looked up at me with a weary, resigned expression I'd never wanted to or thought I'd see on his face, and said more steadily, "Go to Stanley's office, and be quick about it. He'll know you're coming."

Stanley's office was just down the hall, closer to the atrium than I'd wanted to go. It was where I'd planned to go after I'd checked on NeNe. Having Gomez suggest it, though, reminded me it could easily be a trap.

No. No, I couldn't start thinking that way. Gomez was trying to help me. I had to believe that. If anyone knew how to get to NeNe, it would be Stanley. That was the plan: find Stanley, check on NeNe, flee. Flee with NeNe? That seemed the best idea, but could she make it?

"Thank you," I whispered, and darted past him. I almost didn't catch the words he muttered under his breath.

"Don't let me regret this."

 

I could see Stanley's office door open at the other end of the hall as I rounded the final bend--it was the only source of yellow light left among the red-tinted emergency gloom. I could also hear the pounding footsteps of the guard coming down the stair. 

"Fuck," I muttered, considering turning back the other way--but whether he knew it or not, Gomez was right. Stanley was my only real way out of this. If the guards got to him before I did they'd have every alternate route shut down in minutes. 

I pelted down the hall, straining myself as fast as I could go. My breath labored in my ears, my legs pinched and ached. I still wasn't fast enough. 

Three uniformed men appeared in the stairwell. One of them shouted, another pulled a gun. I yelped, jumping sideways just before he fired. My shoulder crunched hard against the wall.

In the confined space of the hallway that single shot was deafening. The sound blasted around us, echoing off the walls. All three guards pressed their hands over their ears, and I fought to keep from doing the same. Much as they carried those guns like they knew what they were doing, they'd never used them off the range. They'd never shot them without protective headgear. 

Neither had I. So I guess there's something to be said for having your life on the line. 

With the limited advantage of their stupidity, I stumbled the last few feet and fell through the office door. It slammed shut behind me, all safety protocol seemingly forgotten. 

Rough hands grabbed me up off the floor, hauling me to my feet. And then I was being held, the scent of motor oil and sweat and beer wafting off Stanley and somehow managing to calm my nerves. That was a blessing and a surprise, given what just happened. 

They really weren't going to arrest me this time. Any lingering doubts were gone now, torn away with the sound of that gunshot and the pounding on the door behind us. 

Stanley shoved me away to arms length, glancing me over--for what I didn't know--before he gave a single nod. I realized he was shaking, possibly harder than I was, and his eyes were bloodshot. "Take this," he snapped, snatching something off a shelf and thrusting it hard into my chest. I caught it by sheer surprise as he turned from me to run his hands over his balding head and survey the office behind him.

Everything was in shambles. Wires and circuit boards and tools, normally arranged with pristine certainty, were everywhere. For a moment I thought security might have ransacked the place, and then I saw the door where the shelves normally stood. 

More like the maintenance tunnel access than the common vault doors, this one was barricaded with a yellow-and-black striped bar across the door, preventing anyone from breaking it down from the inside, and a key-pad code to prevent anyone going in unless they knew the passcode. Or unless they could bypass the lock through the wiring. A panel of wall had been taken off just beside the door; wires dangled from somewhere inside. 

"Stanley. Stanley, do you know where they took NeNe?"

"Put that on," he ordered again, gesturing to the item he'd given me, and continued pacing through the debris. 

I looked down and felt my heart squeeze. Though it looked like every other one in the vault, I knew the pip-boy in my arms. It had been re-painted, again, the glass buffed till it shined, and the leather glove attachment was cleaned and oiled...but this one was mine. It was the one Stanley had rebuilt from parts, just for me. He'd presented me with it on my tenth birthday, the day I'd joined the maintenance crew. 

The door shook. 

I pushed the sleeve of my arm up to my elbow, stuffed my hand into the glove and snapped the straps into place with practiced ease. Suddenly, it didn't matter that it had been three years--this felt right. 

"I loaded it with the maps," Stanley said, though his eyes were on the shaking door. "The robots shouldn't be hostile, but avoid them if you can. If the Overseer figures out how to change their protocol..."

He didn't finish his sentence, just unbarred the door before squatting to tap two cut wires together. The door slid open, revealing a shaft behind it, with a ladder descending into the dark. 

"Stanley--" I started to repeat my question. 

The look he gave me closed my throat around any other words. I couldn't tell if that was despair or disapproval, apprehension or pride, hatred or love. Maybe it was all of them. Maybe it was none. He shifted the wires into one hand and held out his other. "Give it to me."

"Give--what?"

His frown deepened. "Whatever you're using to block the cameras."

I stared at him a long moment before looking down and finally seeing the pen sticking out of my vault suit pocket. The EMP device I'd taken off of Daddy--the one I'd turned...on. Frowning, I pulled it out of my pocket and replayed the conversation with Daddy from before. He'd protested when I'd taken it, hadn't he? When I'd...

When I'd turned it _off_. 

Stanley's eyes had focused on the pen in my hand, as though he couldn't quite believe that was what caused the interference. I handed it over. "That's how they tracked me, isn't it?"

"It took a few minutes," he agreed, "But they realized the interference was moving. They just couldn't pin-point where..."

Something cracked in the office door--the sound ripped through the room not unlike the gunshot in the hall. A glance behind me showed a bulge at it's center and the edges of the door peeling from their frame. 

"Come on," I said, and on the ladder before I realized he wasn't coming.

"Find your father," Stanley said, "He's got some shit to answer for." The door slammed shut before I could protest. 

 

I stayed long enough to hear the bar drop back in place, the panel reset and the shelf being shoved into it's customary position. Something else moved in the room, though I couldn't guess what. Then there was a louder slam followed by shouting. 

"She had a gun!" I heard Stanley protest, before everything dissolved into intelligibility.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I sent up a silent prayer--the first in my life--that Stanley wouldn't be hurt. 

But there was nothing I could do, hanging here on a ladder. Nothing except be caught when they realized what he'd done and got that door open. 

So I opened my eyes on the pitch black darkness, and clung one-handed to the ladder while I fumbled with the pip-boy's switch. There came a lighter sort of darkness as the back-lit screen turned on to a black screen. Green text flooded a column down the left-hand side. 

I winced away and muttered a curse as the stupid computer beeped loudly, hastily rolling down the volume knob. Finally a screen came up, showing a detailed blueprint of the vault--with bonus add-on sections I'd never seen before. Sections including the place I was now standing; the factory levels. 

I'd thought he might send me down here, but I'd hoped to be coming down with him. Or at least, with the knowledge of where they were holding NeNe. There was no hope for that, now, though. Now, there was only downward into the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're finally getting into the meat of the changes! Though the overall arch is very similar to canon, from here on out I've made a lot of clean ups and additions to the core lore. I hope you'll all bear with me through that, and I more than welcome questions if something's unclear (though I may not answer if I've already planned to elaborate in future chapters ;D)

**Author's Note:**

> I've been working on this fic for a little over three years, now. It's gone through about 3 different drafts and I finally decided I would never feel it was ready until I just published it and damn the consequences. I'll be trying to update once a week, as I get chapters edited and finalized. Mondays will probably be update day, at least for now.


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